Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, September 17, 1995 TAG: 9509180088
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER NOTE: Above
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Tech's leaders have set their sights on raising $250 million by the end of 1997. They announced Saturday they have raised $150.2 million, or 60 percent of that goal, in the capital campaign's three-year-old "quiet" phase among big-money donors.
Now the Blacksburg institution is taking its pitch - called "The Campaign for Virginia Tech" - to approximately 70,000 alumni across Virginia in newspaper inserts published today in Richmond, Norfolk and Washington. In Atlanta early next year, the university will launch the first of 38 regional campaigns targeted at the remaining 70,000 Hokies scattered across the country.
Tech intends to use the $250 million for a broad spectrum of needs, from establishing endowed scholarships and professorships to aiding the university's libraries. The campaign will try to sell alumni, corporations and foundations on the idea that Tech is - as the fund drive's slogan goes - "Making a world of difference."
"We're going to be a better institution 21/2 years from now because of these endowments and scholarships and funding," Tech President Paul Torgersen said.
Now in the second year as president, Torgersen, 64, hinted the campaign could be the capstone of his 29-year career as an engineering professor, administrator and leader at Tech.
"I would anticipate seeing this campaign through, and then it might be time to think in terms of another president," he said.
Board of Visitors rector Cliff Garvin, the retired chairman of Exxon Corp., and T. Marshall Hahn, retired Georgia-Pacific Corp. chairman and chief executive, are leading the effort, which is relying on both a development staff of 40 and a network of hundreds of volunteers across the country.
"We realize we still have a lot of work to do," Garvin said. "But I think we all feel very confident that we're going to meet the goal of $250 million."
Hahn led Tech into its modern era of growth when he served as the school's president from 1962 to 1974, after first coming to Tech in 1954 as a department head. The past four decades have seen Tech's "continuous emergence to national prominence," Hahn said. "What this campaign will do is provide that margin of excellence to move Virginia Tech into that very top flight of universities in the country."
The fund drive comes after five years of declining state support for the public university, though Torgersen said that is neither a selling point nor the catalyst for the effort.
``I don't think we want to go to an alumnus and say, `We need your support because the state is not supporting us,''' Torgersen said.
Instead, the money, particularly the $25 million targeted for faculty hiring and the $60 million for student scholarships, will provide Tech with an extra margin it needs to attract and retain top professors and students. Moreover, private funds in some instances can help the university attract matching tax money for building projects, such as the financing arrangement being sought to build the proposed Advanced Communications and Information Technology Center.
"The importance of the campaign is that it sends a signal out to faculty and others that there is support out there beyond the support that the General Assembly and the ... last two governors have been willing to provide," Torgersen said. "I think it will be a psychological shot in the arm for the university community to see this happen."
Tech's fund drive kicks off three weeks before the University of Virginia launches a $700 million capital campaign. UVa has raised nearly $300 million toward that goal.
The effort also comes a decade after Tech's first capital campaign, which began in 1984 with a goal of raising $50 million and ended two years later with a total of $118 million. Garvin also chaired that effort. Between 1990 and '92, Tech also completed an $18 million fund-raising drive for athletics.
The current effort started three years ago with a study by an outside consultant that included 68 in-person interviews and 350 telephone chats with potential donors, said Charles Steger, Tech's vice president for development and university relations. Simultaneously, former provost Fred Carlisle led a "needs assessment" that came up with a $600 million list of goals. That was pared down before Tech began a series of 68 meetings across the country to build a fund-raising network.
A key goal of the campaign is to raise $125 million for Tech's permanent endowment, which stands at approximately $189 million today. That would bring Tech's endowment to an estimated $300 million by the end of the campaign. By comparison, UVa had a $738.4 million endowment as of July 31.
The endowment, administered with all the fund raising through the Virginia Tech Foundation, is designed in particular to provide student scholarships and named professorships.
"We feel that one of the key principles is that we want to make an education possible for any student who has an ability to succeed in the classroom," said Steger, a former architecture dean.
Torgersen said that aspect of the fund-raising drive has a certain resonance with many alumni. The bulk of the students who came to Tech in the '30s, '40s and '50s didn't come from families with long histories of wealth and many had to work their way through school, he said.
"We have some very, very successful graduates who give a lot of credit to their Tech education for their success," Torgersen said. "They'd like to see a youngster not have to work as hard as they did possibly to find their way through college."
by CNB