VC’ s corner
Billions would
make a difference
Universities need to reassess their alumni culture if they want to get more donations. By Ian O’ Connor
32 | March 2013
Alumnus Graham Tuckwell’ s gift of $ 50 million to his alma mater, the Australian National University, for a scholarship program made headline news for days recently and earned the donor a meeting with the prime minister.
The gift“ dwarfed”( said the press) a previous gift of $ 20 million from University of Sydney alumnus John Grill.
Motivating Tuckwell was a desire to help bright kids, including those learning at a disadvantage, while Grill funded a leadership centre aimed at improving Australian knowledge of handling big projects such as the NBN.
One of the pleasing things about higher education fundraising is that we are starting to see more of these US-scale gifts from individual Australian graduates. If we could convince all to“ give back” in the American way – US graduates donated $ 7.7 billion to their alma maters in 2012 – things would be very different for Australian institutions. Travelling cap-in-hand to successive governments seeking a lift in base funding would be less of a forlorn drill.
But big donors are not the whole answer. We need to broaden the donor base in Australia, which is not, as many feel, impossible. The University of Toronto is a public university in a culture not very different from ours, yet is currently shooting for a $ 2 billion campaign result – its first billion was surpassed in January. Britain’ s HEFCE 2012 report into philanthropy in UK higher education found a rise in the number of donors, cash in and new funds raised over the past five years, following the British government’ s 2004 report on how to increase voluntary giving to higher education. It recommended legislative, taxation, cultural, budgetary and organisational changes if UK institutions were to crack the formula.
We have tried here. We have launched appeals, campaigns, hired professional fundraisers and data-based our alumni. Some universities have hired gun‘ advancement’ professionals from the US, only to see their prize recruits depart in frustration after giving it a try for a few years, then announcing that where there is not a cultural will, there is no way to get blood out of a stone.
As Andrew Norton famously pointed out in his Graduate Winners report,“ It’ s not as if graduates don’ t benefit from their time with us. University transforms them. They notch up personal benefits at some expense to the country’ s accounts, and then proceed into the world to put their training and skills to work. We could question why they don’ t see fit to give something back but it would be wrong-headed.”
Of course, graduates of Australian universities return the favour every day – engaging in every field of human endeavor, influencing employers, governments, community groups, friends, colleagues and their younger brothers and sisters about the value of Australian education, often at one particular university.
They ooze competence, knowledge, skill and ability, and put some critical thinking into what they do, which could be anything from fixing your child’ s appendix to marketing fast-moving consumer goods. At Griffith, we think of Philip Di Bella, the coffee entrepreneur, opera star Lisa Gasteen, Clinton Dines, the business pioneer and president of BHP Billiton China for 21 years. Australian university graduates are also largely responsible for so-called“ track two diplomacy”, the alternative way for a country to win over another by pursuing people-to-people relationships formed at universities. Without this soft inter-governmental outreach from graduates, we’ d be reliant on formal missions and trade convoys – and probably stuck fast on our island home, girt by sea and negative terms of trade.
Our problem is being top-of-mind as our graduates go about their professional lives, working, driving, buying a home, meeting new people, changing jobs, volunteering in communities and looking after children and ageing parents. It’ s not that we haven’ t asked for loyalty: check with any of the hundreds of hardworking advancement staff in