Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on February 28, 1990.
The list of terms most often applied to Donald J. Trump -- flamboyant real-estate tycoon, bullying billionaire, and now squabbling partner in a foundering marriage -- doesn’t usually include college philanthropist.
But that may be changing. A new foundation that Mr. Trump has established in his name has plans to provide grants to researchers and scholarships for students at institutions of higher learning. The foundation’s existence is still not widely known among college development officials, but those who are aware of it hope that it, and Mr. Trump himself, will gradually blossom into significant new sources of philanthropic dollars.
Although the foundation is still small, fund-raising consultants and others view the Trump fund as a potential bellwether for many other young millionaires who have yet to make philanthropy a priority.
According to tax records obtained by The Chronicle during the past two months, the list of colleges that have received funds from the Donald J. Trump Foundation includes Adelphi University, Iona College, Long Island University, the University of Miami, New York University, and Brandeis University. Each institution received small grants ranging from $1,000 to $10,000, generally for research or benefit dinners. Information on gifts awarded in 1989 was not available.
Mr. Trump did not respond to repeated requests for information and interviews concerning the activities of his foundation. Norma Foerderer, Mr. Trump’s executive assistant, declines to discuss its specifics, saying only that the foundation is in its early stages. “There’s a lot that he wants to do, but right now the priorities are being determined,” she told The Chronicle.
Meanwhile, other colleges are actively mining for Trump gold, with varying degrees of success.
The Ohio State University, for example, hoped a personal connection might crack open the Trump vault. Its fund raisers wrote the billionaire a letter last year after learning that he had delivered a eulogy at a New York memorial service for Jerry L. Floyd, an interior designer who had served as design director for the Trump Organization until his death in 1988. Mr. Floyd had graduated from Ohio State.
University officials say they prepared a proposal for Mr. Trump to donate half a million dollars for an interior-design professorship to be established in Mr. Floyd’s name at Ohio State’s College of the Arts. Mr. Trump’s office rejected the proposal “very graciously,” says a university official, who requested anonymity.
A second Ohio State proposal called for Mr. Trump to establish a $15,000 memorial scholarship fund for Mr. Floyd in the College of Arts and Sciences. Mr. Trump’s office also rejected that idea, adding that if Mr. Trump were inclined to give at such a level, he would do so to his alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania.
Ohio State officials are not discouraged, however. “Getting on their priority list is what we’re trying to do here,” says the official, adding that Ohio State is “just one of literally thousands” jockeying for that position.
Ms. Foerderer confirmed the intensity of the philanthropic competition: Of the 1,000 telephone calls screened daily at the Trump Organization, many are from colleges asking for donations, she says.
Some of the colleges “are so obscure that there’s no reason under the sun why he would give to them,” says Ms. Foerderer, adding that often the colleges don’t have even a remote connection to Mr. Trump. “When he does decide to give, Mr. Trump would be much more inclined to give to a college or university that either he or his family attended,” she adds.
Mr. Trump applied to the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status for his foundation on December 24, 1987. As stated in documents filed with the application, the foundation had a proposed annual budget of $300,000, which it has since exceeded. The foundation stated that it planned to award that amount as follows: $30,000 to medical-research organizations; $45,000 each to cultural, religious, and educational organizations; $30,000 to youth-service organizations; and $105,000 to “other organized charities.”
The Trump Foundation disbursed about $130,000 in grants and contributions to hospitals, universities, schools, and organized charities in 1987. By the end of 1988, the foundation had granted about half a million dollars to non-profit organizations, including several thousand dollars to half a dozen colleges and universities primarily in the northeastern United States, according to the foundation’s 1988 federal tax statement.
Compared with the wealth of its principal contributor, the foundation’s beginning is modest. (Mr. Trump’s largest gifts -- $1-million for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission and a building appraised at $4.75-million to the United Cerebral Palsy’s Research and Education Foundation -- were awarded before his foundation existed.)
Waldemar A. Nielsen, director of the Aspen Institute’s Program for the Advancement of Philanthropy and author of two books on private foundations, disparages the current size of Mr. Trump’s gifts as “chicken feed” and “kind of dinky,” compared to his total fortune, which has been estimated at between $1- and $3-billion. He notes that many of the foundation’s $1,000 and $2,000 donations to colleges have paid for tickets to dinners held in New York.
Some fund-raising consultants and college development officers are skeptical of efforts to cultivate Mr. Trump as a major donor, noting that highly visible celebrities like him are swamped with solicitations from hundreds of organizations.
Bobbie J. Strand, a Minneapolis fund-raising consultant, says Mr. Trump is so highly visible that she uses him in hypothetical case studies to demonstrate how college fund raisers could go about identifying major donors. But she adds that in most cases, Mr. Trump is “not going to be a viable prospect” and warns colleges against getting “snagged on the big, glamorous names and then ignoring . . . really good, solid prospects.”
Still, other fund-raising professionals regard the foundation as a promising seedling that may grow into a major new source of philanthropic funds, possibly on the order of the country’s major foundations.
To them, Mr. Trump’s wealth represents the first trickle of a geyser of riches earned during the past decade by a new generation of self-absorbed young millionaires. The consultants express the hope that Mr. Trump, who has also been referred to as the Howard Hughes of the baby boomers, will help lead a segment of millionaires now entering their forties into sustained and systematic philanthropy.
“He could be that tip of the iceberg -- a window into all the wealth of the baby boomers,” says David M. Lawson, a fund-raising consultant to a variety of non-profit organizations. Mr. Lawson says a growing portion of his clients are now requesting information on wealthy people in Mr. Trump’s age group. The names are confidential, he says.
Officials at the University of Pennsylvania may currently be in the best position to understand Mr. Trump’s giving habits, since they say they remain in “close touch” with him and have approached him, unsuccessfully, for major gifts ranging from a Donald Trump dormitory to a Trump hospital wing. Mr. Trump graduated from the university’s Wharton School of Finance in 1968 and has made donations to Wharton and to Penn that are in the "$100,000 range,” a university official says. Penn has other plans to cultivate Mr. Trump, but the details are confidential.
“As far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump gives to Penn at a level that’s higher than 90 per cent” of other alumni, says Rick Nahm, vice-president for development and university relations. “He’s just a good, average major do-nor.”
So far, Mr. Trump has not indicated his willingness to give at a level rivaling that of members of the “principal gifts group” -- donors who give $1-million or more. One well-known member of that group is Saul Steinberg, the buyout king and chairman of the Reliance Group, who last year gave $25-million to the university.
Mr. Trump’s initiation into that group may not come this year: Some financial analysts suggest that he is heavily indebted because of several expensive recent purchases, including the Eastern Airlines shuttle between Washington, New York, and Boston. Further, his three Atlantic City casinos have left him with debts of $1.28-billion.
His finances may be complicated even more by possible divorce proceedings. His wife, Ivana Trump, is listed as vice-president of the Trump Foundation; lawyers for neither party would answer questions about the impact of a divorce on the foundation’s operations.
Even so, fund-raising professionals say Mr. Trump has the relatively untapped potential to be a major donor at colleges nationwide.
Part of the reason for that potential lies in his possession of another quality that makes college fund raisers get out their prospect lists: “an unconscionable ego,” says Arthur C. Frantzreb, an independent consultant in philanthropy. “People like that are going to be philanthropic when their ego will be complimented,” Mr. Frantzreb says. He calls the thousand-dollar donations Mr. Trump has made to colleges “an insult to both parties. Whoever is asking for $1,000 to $5,000, technically speaking, has insulted him. He’s not a thousand-dollar donor.”
But the work of turning him into a million-dollar donor remains an arduous task. Those who decide to try will be wise to labor in the gray realm of “who knows who,” says Mr. Frantzreb, adding that proven methods of successfully soliciting millionaires involve establishing the identity of Mr. Trump’s friends, business associates, colleagues, and “board of advisers.”
“The real problem is to figure out how to reach this guy through persons of influence,” Mr. Frantzreb says. “You have to go through very circuitous routes.”
The routes can be so circuitous that for most college development officers, Mr. Trump has remained distant and unapproachable, too protected by security officers and staff members for them to tell him their colleges’ stories.
“Everybody’s always saying that since Donald Trump has interests in Florida, he ought to be a donor” to the University of Miami, says Rita Bornstein, vice-president for development affairs at that university. Mr. Trump gave $1,000 to the university in 1988, a sum that went to support research on spinal-cord injuries, Ms. Bornstein says. “But I tell them that we have to know him, for him even to be a prospect,” she adds.
A few other colleges have “Trump plans” in the works. Long Island University, for example, is planning to contact Mr. Trump through a personal friend who graduated from the university, campus officials say.
Likewise, officials at a Connecticut university have asked fund-raising consultant David M. Thompson to help find ways to approach Mr. Trump for a major donation to its business school, Mr. Thompson says. “Trump is definitely on the list,” he says.
As an Ohio State official notes, Mr. Trump’s tax burden may eventually render such offers more attractive. The official adds that he thinks Mr. Trump will give larger amounts to colleges, if approached in the right manner and at the right time. “College fund raisers and presidents perhaps have to teach him to share -- we have to educate Donald Trump to share, so to speak.”
There are some indications that Mr. Trump, in time, may be a willing pupil.
“I’ve spent the first 20 years of my working life building, accumulating, and accomplishing things,” he writes in his 1987 autobiography, Trump: The Art of the Deal. “The biggest challenge I see over the next 20 years is to figure out some creative ways to give back some of what I’ve gotten.”