Teagle Essays

Fundraising from Two Perspectives—College President and Foundation President

Richard Morrill

The Teagle Foundation

When Rich Ekman asked me to share experiences about moving from one side of the philanthropic desk to the other, I readily agreed. We all know that you have to be a little off center and driven to take a college president’s job. CIC’s recent data on how few chief academic officers aspire to be presidents makes the point. Please be relieved that this will not be a talk about presidential personality disorders—those have already been diagnosed by the faculty and staff back home. But, more seriously, in the constant round of balancing the expectations of internal and external constituencies, how do you avoid professional schizophrenia? We all try to stay whole in what we do. Through several presidencies I’ve learned that your vocation stays the same even as your job changes. The same applies as you move from president of a college to a foundation.

Although everyone has a different way of describing the vital center that motivates a presidency, I found that seeing myself primarily as educator made sense out of the crazy range of my responsibilities. At least in my own self-understanding, I was driven by what I take to be the transformative power of liberal education in enlarging human possibilities. I see education as a moral imperative, and for me it is nothing short of a form of faith. When you are lobbying a legislator, testifying in court when you’ve been sued, attending the funeral of a student, or squeezing the last nickel out of a donor or a budget, the educator role seems thin and remote. Those are the times it is most important to find a sanctuary to get some remove on the work and to recapture its purpose, or to take to the balcony to observe the swirl of activity below from a distance, using metaphors from Ron Heifetz.

So, viewing it in perspective, I come to the work of the Teagle Foundation primarily as an educator, neither as an academic specialist nor as an administrator. In my case, it helps to have had a lot of administrative experience and to be trained in fields like moral philosophy and religious studies that provide accounts of human flourishing. But there are many paths to the work of educator, some of which were blazed innovatively and boldly by my predecessor Bob Connor, as he focused the work of the Foundation on the improvement of liberal education.

There are several other powerful continuities in the work of presidents of colleges and foundations. One of these is the work of strategy and strategic thinking. Whether you practice it elaborately and systematically or tacitly and randomly, no one in a leadership role can responsibly avoid setting a direction for the future. As I have argued at length elsewhere, strategy can be a discipline and method of leadership that has special relevance in academic communities, in which I would include some foundations. We talk often these days with good reason about whether the financial model of higher education is broken or unsustainable. Whatever its state, there is an equal underlying problem—most institutions of higher education don’t have decision-making models or cultures with which they can effectively address their financial futures. So it’s a double bind.

I find that strategic thinking and decision-making translate directly and powerfully into the work of a Foundation. Let me provide an extended illustration that will make this point and tell you something about how we think of Teagle’s work.

Strategy is iterative work that can start at many different places, and return there several times along the strategic way. It might start outside with a scan, or inside with mission and vision. One of its primary tasks is to find the threads of identity in the Foundation’s history and identity, much as occurs in a college. It is finding what I call the story or narrative of an organization. It turns on the deep values and beliefs of a place, on its most compelling characteristics and the most powerful core capabilities that it possesses. As it proceeds in this kind of thinking, it turns to a more formal articulation of mission and vision in answer to questions like, “At what do we excel?”

When you look at Teagle in these terms you find interesting points of orientation for the Foundation’s story. Walter Teagle the founder, was the president and chief executive of Standard Oil of New Jersey for 20 years from 1917 to 1937, when he assumed the chairmanship of the board, retiring in 1942. He transformed Standard Oil into a fully integrated international oil company. He was the first long-term president to succeed John D. Rockefeller, and his commitment to philanthropy was modeled in some measure on the Rockefeller Foundation and other Rockefeller charities. The articles of incorporation articulate a very broad purpose for the Teagle Foundation: “To promote the well-being and good of mankind throughout the world. . . .” The paragraph continues by specifying aid for individuals in need, for institutions of higher learning and research, for medical research and treatment, and for charitable, religious and missionary activities.

The criteria are so broad as to allow an enormous range of philanthropy. Providing more direction than the charter were two letters Mr. Teagle wrote in 1944 and 1948 to fellow board members, who included representatives of Standard Oil and Cornell University, suggesting preferences but not requirements that some gifts be made to institutions like his alma mater Cornell, and a series of other organizations. During the time Mr. Teagle was active until the mid-1950s, there was a wide array of support for medical research and for scholarship aid. The largest form of scholarship aid eventually was directed to provide “educational advantage” for employees and of Standard Oil and their children. That program continues today with about $650,000 annually going to ExxonMobil employee’s children for competitive financial aid awards and a series of small honorary scholarships. The idea of scholarship aid took hold in more general terms, and by the end of the 1980s about 90% of the Foundation’s funds were committed to small grants for scholarships at dozens of colleges. Centre College, where I served as president, became one of them with a $10,000 annual award. Centre later received two grants to assist neighboring colleges to improve alumni giving rates. When I left Centre in 1988, I was asked to join the Teagle board. In terms of the Teagle story, I find the term “educational advantage” to be a telling motif.

When Dick Kimball arrived in 1987 to serve as the Foundation’s first full-time executive director, then president, there was a major shift in the programs of the Foundation. The emphasis on “educational advantage” continued but the scholarship program ended, except for the ExxonMobil program. Now the concern was focused on helping small colleges with a high proportion of Pell grant students with unrestricted grants of $250,000 through a competitive awards program. By the early 1990s the Foundation’s endowment had grown substantially and it continued to do so all during that decade. Every time I came to New York City for a meeting it seemed to be up another $10 million, and it reached a peak of $220 million as the new century dawned. I chaired the Foundation’s program committee for many years, and saw the small college grant program morph into administrative and academic capacity building grants targeted at colleges with modest endowments. By the end of the 1990s and early 2000s the grants become quite large and averaged $300,000 or more for a single institution. The market traumas of the last ten years have seen the endowment decline sharply in the early 2000s, rebound in the mid-2000s, and then undergo the sharp drop of two years ago, and now experience a very slow recovery.

When Bob Connor arrived as the new president in mid-2003 there was a grant moratorium as he pondered the future, visited prior grant recipients, studied the history, and considered the wider environment. The board grew from 9 to 15 members and several business leaders and academic luminaries were added to the board. Bob reflected on the term “educational advantage” for students in a new light, and interpreted the phrase in part through Mr. Teagle’s own experience at Cornell where he blossomed into an outstanding student in chemistry. Educational advantage is about both access and quality and offers a transforming opportunity for a person’s life. Done right, study in the arts and sciences offers the kind of powerful education Mr. Teagle received at Cornell.

So the narrative of the Foundation depends on several factors: the formal documents, the donor’s intent, the record through time, the commitments of the board, and the executive leadership. It involves finding the meaning of the internal narrative, and testing possibilities in the context of a changing world. A methodical scan of the environment is required. What are the driving forces of change both on and off the campus? What is the state of liberal education in this context, and how might it be improved?

In a surprise to many of us on the board, especially the chairman of the program committee, Bob Connor, this former distinguished professor of classics at Princeton, began to focus on the improvement of liberal education through assessment. Like other observers it became clear to Bob and eventually to the board that assessment was rising on several national radar screens, and it is still there in various forms, especially tied to the national concern about college completion. That dreaded “a” word for many in academic life was put on our banner, but it was changed substantially in the process. It was to be focused and grow out of the work of the faculty, not imposed on them. It was to seek out evidence of the kind that faculty members could and often do use in their own teaching, though usually unsystematically. Using evidence was to be oriented toward the improvement of liberal education not as a form of ranking or judgment. CIC knows well the type of work Teagle has funded in its extensive project on the CLA.

During this period the Foundation has supported dozens of collaborations among liberal arts colleges and a number of universities to advance the work of gathering evidence to improve student learning. It has as well invested $1 million a year to support college access to liberal education for lower income students in New York, supporting collaborations among community-based organizations and New York-area colleges and universities.

This work over the last seven years has produced a variety of new features in the strategic identity of the Foundation. Teagle has developed a set of new competencies and characteristics. The purpose of grants has moved from organizational capacity building at single institutions to developing knowledge with a bias for action that can be widely shared among institutions. To foster the sharing of knowledge and develop a critical mass of participation, most Teagle grants have been made to collaborating groups of institutions and to associations with broad membership. The Foundation has tried to leverage its grants by making awards to faculty-driven projects on campuses, to emerging leaders, to disciplinary societies, and is piloting grants in graduate education to expand the understanding of assessment among future college teachers. At times the Foundation has the flavor of a “think tank” in the meetings that it sponsors, and in the exploratory work that it initiates. At other times the Foundation has taken on some of the character of a “working foundation” through close and active collaboration with its grantees in the implementation of its grants, especially the Wabash National Study. To extend its influence and communicate its findings, the Foundation has developed a website that conveys a wide range of information about assessment, its grants, and that provides a vehicle for information and opinion about liberal education. Teagle will soon publish a collection of essays about assessment in literary studies on its website edited by Donna Heiland, vice president of the Foundation and Laura Rosenthal, professor of English at the University of Maryland. Teagle grantees have made dozens of presentations at regional and national meetings, and large numbers of editorials and articles have been authored by staff and grantees for the higher education presses.

In planning for the future, the Foundation is seeking to extend the basic patterns of its work over the past several years. We are one of only a handful of national foundations that focus on student learning in college. Moreover, the strategic importance of the questions about student learning continues to be high, especially as our society struggles to achieve both access and quality in higher education. The emphasis on increasing credentials makes eminent sense but only if we simultaneously have a clear idea of the achievements and capacities that a degree represents.

Teagle’s programs will evolve. We have, for example, initiated a program that focuses on the active use not just collection of evidence to improve student learning. I just read an excellent proposal on how two colleges plan to use evidence about student performance in quantitative reasoning to change the courses and course modules that they use to address their math and quantitative reasoning requirements. Work by one initiative, the Wabash National Study, has shown that time and again that evidence about student learning that is at hand on campuses is not used as the basis for action to improve courses or programs.

Let me offer some thoughts about resources in the world of the academy and a small foundation. There are many differences but more parallels than you might think. The challenges for presidents surrounding resources in most private and public colleges in this era take us to the very question of viability—we are moving from freezing compensation and leaving positions unfilled to cutting off whole departments. In my forty-five years in this work it has never been worse, and we clearly need to find new ways of conceiving of how education will be provided. As a story in the Chronicle recounted the other day, some pledges are being cut or going unpaid, so the recourse to fundraising is uncertain. At foundations, endowments have dropped dramatically and the spending formulae of most places are now registering two or three of the lowest years for equity values in the past decade. Meeting prior commitments pegged at higher values, combined with lower current revenues creates a double hit. We have seen our grant budget drop by about a third. Some flexibility will return as earlier grants are paid out. Foundations have only one source of revenue, so you can’t raise tuition, build endowment, add a new revenue source, and so forth. You can try to work collaboratively with other foundations to stretch dollars, but that is a complex process. In that regard, you have few choices. You obviously can give fewer grants, and restrain or cut other budgets. You can also put yourself out of business by keeping your grants at a high level, but that may create legal problems depending on the terms of donor gifts. Because the IRS requires 5% spending for grants and direct grant expenses, most foundations actually spend more than 5% of their endowment, so in this low yield environment most foundations are in the process of slow liquidation.

In the long term, the work of using evidence has to face several key issues. One of these is for the improvement of student learning to become a natural element in the professional identity of faculty members, which in turn connects it to the recognition and reward systems of colleges and universities. This system of recognition is part of a wide and deep academic culture which is worthy of respect, but should not be impermeable to change and adaptation. Academic culture depends in turn on choices that faculty members and academic leaders make based on their values, their mission and their vision of the quality of teaching and learning to which they aspire. Those decisions are linked to a larger set of strategic priorities that respond to broad educational, technological, economic and social influences.

The authority of presidents in this complex system is limited, but real. Presidents are the most influential individuals on campus. I suggest that now is the time to draw what we know about success in student learning into a systematic and integrated strategic focus for the work of presidents. Integrative presidential leadership is the essential to the process. Only presidents can pull together the threads of the story into a new whole and then go on to make things happen across the whole institution. In ways not yet fully recognized, this complex integrative task of presidential leadership is the key to continuously embedding small and large improvements in students learning throughout the campus. Presidents integrate decisions about both academic and student experience across the organization, they know and tell the story of institutional and student success to more audiences and in more places than anyone else. They synthesize information and make decisions about resources and priorities as no one else is empowered to do. One central goal of presidential leadership today is for the documented improvements in the learning of students to become a point of definition in the messages that colleges and universities communicate about themselves to their students, prospective students, their alumni and their publics. As he critiques the predictable rush toward prestige by acquiring resources, Russ Edgerton suggests that it should not be the only game in town. He argues that “efforts can be mounted to earn a reputation for effectiveness in contributing to student learning, and further that “leaders could become more aggressive about what constitutes evidence of quality.” (Edgerton, “Going for the Gold in Undergraduate Education,” 414, in Bachetti and Ehrlich, Reconnecting Education and Foundations, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2007.)

Only presidents as educators can integrate the sense-making narratives, the coherent strategy processes and priorities, and the actions that will simultaneously improve student learning, create competitive advantage and strengthen the institution. Our society has never needed this kind of presidential and educational leadership more than it does now. Presidents have a vital role at a vital time in unfolding the promise of Walter Teagle’s “educational advantage.”

These remarks were delivered at the Council of Independent Colleges’ 2010 Conversation between Foundation Officers and College and University Presidents on October 12, 2010 in New York City.

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