COUNCIL: State of the University |
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November 3, 2015, Volume 62, No. 12 |
At the October 28 University Council meeting, the first portion was devoted to the focus issue: the history and current status of open expression and academic freedom at Penn. Senior Vice President and General Counsel Wendy White provided the historical context, then Associate Vice Provost for Student Affairs Karu Kozuma spoke about Penn’s approach to open expression and the role of guidelines as well as a Council committee and the observers (formerly known as monitors). Vice Provost for Faculty Anita Allen noted that while open expression is a “glorious public value” with moral limits it can have adverse consequences. Associate Vice Provost for Equity and Access Will Gipson focused on the Campaign for Community as an opportunity to contribute to discussions about what matters most and to address national issues that impact the Penn community.
The second portion was devoted to the annual State of the University. There were two topics discussed; below is the first of two presentations. After mentioning the newly announced President’s Innovation Prize (see here), Penn President Amy Gutmann introduced John Zeller, who described Penn Impact 2020,which is part of Penn Compact 2020.
The second presentation concerned Mental Health Issues on Campus and will be in next week’s issue.
John Zeller, Vice President, Development & Alumni Relations
I was reflecting on the last time that I appeared before this group. It was 10 weeks before the conclusion of the Making History campaign and when asked where we stood I was unable to articulate what the number was because we were keeping it a secret (Almanac November 6, 2012). A few months later we announced that we had surpassed the $3.5 billion-dollar goal with commitments of $4.3 billion and cash of $3.6 billion. This is a remarkable testament to the entire Penn community: alumni, friends, donors, leadership, trustees, the list goes on. But there was another goal associated with the Making History campaign that wasn’t measured in terms of numerical contributions. That was the effort to not only successfully meet the three core priorities of the Campaign: the $3.5 billion goal, the highest priorities of the Schools and Centers and what we called our non-financial objectives, but also to elevate and sustain our post-campaign engagement in support of the Penn family so that all of the work that was done to increase our engagement and our success in our fundraising would continue.
Dr. Gutmann articulated the post-campaign focus for Development and Alumni Relations under her broader plan known as the Penn Compact 2020. We have taken that charge and built an infrastructure to support fundraising and alumni engagement. We have created the development and alumni relations portion as you just heard from the President branded as Penn Impact 2020.
The Penn Impact 2020 focuses on key University priorities that also marked the center post of the Making History campaign: support for undergraduate, graduate and professional student aid, endowed faculty positions at all levels and the continuation of our engagement activities University-wide.
Penn Impact 2020 is a focused five-year effort that began last year with the aforementioned University priorities, and will evolve this year to include strategic priorities for the Schools and Centers. Given the transitions of a number of Deans, this activity will be ongoing as priorities are identified in the various Schools. All of this activity will have annual goals for each element embedded in the planning. This represents what we focus on, and as Dr. Gutmann said, the final push will occur in FY19.
Let me give you a quick update on the University priorities. Following the conclusion of the Campaign, Dr. Gutmann reiterated the importance of sustaining the momentum in two key areas: student aid and faculty support.
For student aid, a goal was established of raising $350 million in new support in addition to the $650 million raised during the Campaign, bringing the total raised for this key priority since 2005 to $1 billion. At the end of September 2015, we were at $826 million dollars towards that billion-dollar goal. This is a very positive trajectory.
Let me break it down for you, as undergraduate financial aid is really one of the fundamental core elements. We finished the Campaign at $366.5 million and we stand at $477.6 million through September 30 with the aspirational goal of achieving $600 million towards additional endowment support towards undergraduate financial aid.
When you tie undergraduate financial aid fundraising and the financial aid budget together, you see the importance of focusing on undergraduate financial aid. In a need-blind environment, the budget has grown from $80 million to $206 million this past year. I should note that when we began the Campaign, roughly 10% of the undergraduate financial aid budget came from endowment. At the conclusion of the Campaign, coupling both new commitments and the investment returns, that number is now 25%. We still have a long way to go but are making a lot of progress.
The resonance of this with our alumni and friends is pretty dramatic. Since 2005 we have created 1,135 new scholarships across the four undergraduate Schools. The peak of this was in 2006 and it dipped a little during the recession, but our donors stayed with us and we achieved a really remarkable return.
Graduate-level aid was one of the objectives of the Campaign. It did give me some pause; I was nervous about how we would do in raising funds because the nature of graduate aid is so different across the 12 Schools. However, we received $285 million in graduate aid through the Campaign with the goal of adding another $115 million, bringing the total to $400 million for new endowment. We are at roughly $350 million to date. I don’t like to make predictions but I think that we are going to blow through the $400 million goal relatively soon.
An equally important priority for Penn Impact 2020 is the continued emphasis on faculty support. Faculty is the fundamental key to the success of any University. Dr. Gutmann had charged us with looking at how we could build on the success of $573 million in new faculty support. This is predominantly endowments at all levels—the assistant, the associate, the full and the PIK program that Dr. Gutmann initiated when she started her presidency. The goal is to bring the total to $900 million, of which we are at $719 million. This has been accelerated by the President creating the matching program for donors for at least 50 new endowments in faculty appointments across the Schools. That incentive match has already generated 18 new Presidential Distinguished and PIK Professorships in 14 months, so the resonance and the messaging around this has been very strong.
I think it is important to see how the growth of support for key priorities has grown, from pre-campaign levels to the Campaign averages, but more importantly, how that level has continued into the Penn Impact 2020. Our goal of sustaining our momentum and level of support has been a focus of our work and we are seeing the positive results. This is one of the great challenges coming out of the Campaign—being able to not only achieve a new level of fundraising but to sustain it.
The fundraising priorities are distributed across the University, ranging from student aid, faculty, capital, programs and research, and unrestricted. This of course varies by School and Center, and in the aggregate, it is very similar to the distribution for the Making History campaign, when we were doing the planning in 2005-2006. The categories really do have an impact in all 12 Schools and in the six Centers.
Engagement was the third element of the Making History campaign, and like fundraising, our goal was to build on the success of the Campaign and grow our engagement activities across all Schools, taking best practices and applying the principles to the unique nature of each program. We said at the beginning of the Campaign, if we don’t take the energy, effort and resources to launch the Campaign and at the same time embrace the opportunity for people to participate in the fabric of the life of the University, in whatever way that might be, we would have failed. I am pleased to say that our engagement has never been stronger, more diverse or more global in its nature and we will continue to focus on this.
I am going to put a shameless plug in here. How many of you sitting in this room are members of Quaker Net? Quaker Net is something that you should join because it is a search engine tool that you can use by affinity, by class, by geography and by nature of employment. You can connect with people on it and we have found it to be an incredibly robust tool to bring people together. It is kind of modeled on Facebook. If you are not on it, I would strongly encourage you to join as it is a tool that no matter where you are in the world, you can log in and say, “I wonder if I have somebody from this class or from this area of interest within 25 miles away from where I happen to be.”
This slide (10-year Penn Donor History) gives you a graphic 10-year history of our donor growth by constituency. It shows where we started in the beginning of the Campaign and the continued growth in engagement and how support of Penn’s priorities has grown. As you can see, we have very broad support that continues to grow each year. This is a testament to the vision the Penn Compact 2020 represents, and how it resonates with the entire Penn family.
In closing, the Penn Impact 2020 development model is constructed of the three core priorities combined with programs and research, capital and unrestricted support. It provides for focus and goals, but also the continuing development of new priorities for each of the Schools and Centers. We wanted to build a construct that would allow us to attach to those core priorities the individual School and Center priorities—whether they fall in programs or research, capital and unrestricted support. That process will continue over the next few months and I am very excited about what the outcome will be for Penn. It will have a great impact to help us reach the new objectives for the new and long-term seated Deans and Center directors.
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