A majority of the donation — $35-million — will be used to help pay for a new education center for the university’s School of Medicine. A site for the facility, which will house medical laboratories, lecture halls, and classrooms, has not yet been set.

The remaining money will be used to help pay for a new facility that will link in-patient and outpatient services at the McGovern-Davison Children’s Health Center at Duke.

The endowment, a charitable trust based in Charlotte, N.C., is independent of the university and is its largest benefactor. Previous gifts include a $75-million donation to Duke University in 2005.

But here’s a new one: Bob Krause, vice president for institutional advancement at Kansas State University, was named today as the permanent athletic director at the Big 12 institution.

The move coincides with Kansas State’s expansion of its athletics facilities, and raises the question: Will more big athletics programs look to fund raisers to run the show?

Taking a look back at predictions made by alumni association leaders in 1998 in a Currents magazine article, many of them hit the mark, Mr. Shaindlin observes. Some said they believed that technology will be used to sustain relationships, that associations will struggle to compete with an increasing array of entertainment choices for members, and that career services would become the “staple of the profession.”

By 2018, Mr. Shaindlin writes, affinity programs like alumni credit cards will be regulated and providers will be licensed by the government, online communities will no longer be thought of as a “separate activity, any more than we think of people we talk to on the phone as a ‘telephone community,’” and social networks will be replaced by complete connectivity, where anyone online will have direct connection with anyone else online.

How will changes in the way alumni associations operate and serve their membership change the way higher-education fund-raising professionals do their jobs? How will the evolution of connectivity influence the way alumni give back?

Columbia University has received $32-million in state funds, and New York University has collected $50-million, the newspaper reports. Meanwhile, Columbia is in the middle of a $4-billion fund-raising campaign and NYU is raising $2.5-billion in private donations.

“At a time when we’re facing budget cuts, is it appropriate?” asked Marsha S. Henderson, vice president for external affairs at the State University of New York at Buffalo, in the article.

It’s hardly a debate that is unique to New York. Should institutions with the ability to raise significant private donations also receive public funds, especially when public universities are facing financial difficulties? For all kinds of institutions—public or private—does success in private fund raising jeopardize the case the institutions make for seeking public appropriations?

The Las Vegas Sun reports that Bill Boldt, vice president for advancement, was hoping to have five “crucial fund-raising jobs” filled by the end of January. He recruited two new staff members, but the search continues for the other three.

While UNLV is clearly not the only institution dealing with the challenge of recruiting skilled fund raisers, it comes at a particularly difficult time for the university because this is the final year of its seven-year campaign.

“The demand for qualified fund-raising professionals has never been higher,” Mr. Boldt told the newspaper. “The problem is that universities do not train people. There’s only one or two programs in the country … where students are trained in philanthropic studies.”

The original goal set by university officials was $15-million. But what might make the $39.4-million raised seem even larger is that hired fund-raising consultants suggested that the target should be around $5-million.

Sherry Hoppe, former president of Austin Peay State, said “she knew the Clarksville and alumni communities could do more,” according to the article.

The good news is that 65 percent of the organizations raised more money in 2007 than they did in 2006. The not-so-good news: In 2006 almost a quarter of respondents had increased fund-raising revenue by more than 50 percent, but in 2007 only 9 percent of the charities saw a similar increase.

“2007 seemed to a typical year for fund raising until the environment
changed dramatically at the end of the year with the mortgage crisis,” said Paulette V. Maehara, president of the association, in a written statement. “The impact was very uneven, so the million-dollar question is, do these decreases represent a return to normalcy from the very strong year we saw in 2006, or the beginning of a much bigger slide in fund raising and giving?”

Timothy R. Burcham, vice president of advancement for the Kentucky Community and Technical College system and chair of the association, said 2008 could be one of the most challenging years fund raisers have seen in some time.

“Charities don’t need to panic but need to retool their strategies and focus more than ever on donor cultivation and stewardship,” he said, in a written statement. “We’re still early in 2008, and the fund-raising environment could still change significantly.”

Mr. Meehan had a $5-million campaign fund, the biggest in the House, when he left after eight terms. Now he is proclaiming that his inaugural will garner “more money for scholarships than any inauguration of a president has in any college or university, any public college or university, in Massachusetts history,” the Boston Globe reports.

“We’re well over half a million now. It’s going to go up,” he told the Globe.

The week-long festivities will end on Friday with a keynote speech by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The inaugural gala, ceremony, and reception cost $1,000 per person, on top of a concert and reception with $100 tickets.

Of the $650,000 raised, about $50,000 will be used to pay for the events, the newspaper reports. That is a far cry from the 2006 inauguration of Michael F. Collins at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, which cost $512,525 and included a concert by the hip-hop artist Kanye West and a celebratory dinner of seared sea scallops and roasted filet of beef.

Donations will go to either a music education endowment or to the Chancellor Martin T. Meehan Educational Excellence Endowment Fund.

In a letter to the chairman of the Board sent this month, 16 members of the MCC Foundation, the fund-raising arm of the college, said that they “respectfully encourage you not to consider anyone as a finalist for this position unless their name is on the list of candidates presented by one of the two search committees.”

The two presidential search committees gave the Board two recommended candidates, but trustees voted to add two local nominations to the list, the newspaper reported. After some foundation leaders questioned the motives of board members and the controversy became more public, the fund raisers seemed to back off of their complaints, possibly fearful that adding to the debate might further shake donors’ confidence in the institution.

The foundation released a statement on Tuesday, saying that “the debate will not shake the public’s commitment to the institution and the community it serves so well,” the article said.

Currently the largest fund-raising campaign underway in higher education is at Stanford University, where officials hope to raise $4.3-billion by 2011. Columbia and Cornell Universities are each in $4-billion campaigns.

“The goal of $3-billion was set to meet the priorities that we identified at the time, and we don’t want to go back to deans or faculty and say, ‘Well, sorry, we have to take a few things away because we need to raise money now for a new priority,’” Inge Reichenbach, vice president for development at Yale, told the newspaper. “That is not what we want to do. That is not what is going to happen.”

Yale is already ahead of the game, having raised almost $2.1-billion. It puts the university one year ahead of schedule in the campaign, though some people have questioned why the goal was not set higher to begin with, as other “peer institutions” were raising more.

Yale officials believe the new target will be between $3.5-billion and $4-billion.

“We need to think about raising the goal,” Richard Levin, university president, said in the article. “We’re assessing the feasibility of doing so.”