Higher-education fundraising is a complicated dance between college leaders who depend on philanthropy to fulfill their mission and major donors who often have their own ideas about how their funds should be spent. This delicate choreography can topple when a gulf develops between what donors think they’re supporting and what the university is building.
I should know. I was dean of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill journalism school when our faculty recruited Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and alum Nikole Hannah-Jones to be the prestigious Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. That was the plan, at least until a donor clash blew it up.
I’ve relived that experience repeatedly in recent months as college campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war have resulted in public discord between donors and university presidents. This ultimately led to the resignation last week of Harvard President Claudine Gay less than a month after University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down.
Donor Influence
I believe my experience offers lessons that can help universities and the larger nonprofit world better avoid conflicts between donors and the leadership of institutions they support — and underscores the need for guidelines that clearly lay out expectations for both parties.
Recognizing Obstacles
In retrospect, the Hannah-Jones saga was riddled with foreseeable landmines. The biggest landed shortly before she accepted our offer and agreed to go through the grueling academic review of her work required for the tenured position.
We had received the largest gift in the journalism school’s history — $25 million — from another alum, newspaper publisher Walter Hussman Jr. We decided to honor his gift by naming the journalism school after him — the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.
Hussman is from an earlier generation of journalism than Hannah-Jones and is a successful local news executive. He is a man of values who has served his community. So I was pleased to have his family’s name on the school, following vetting from a university naming committee.
It was a happy and successful donor–university relationship, until it wasn’t.
Hussman didn’t think hiring Hannah-Jones was a good decision, and he said so to me and the university’s development leader. He also reached out behind the scenes to members of the university governance boards who would vote on Hannah-Jones’s tenure. And when the controversy went public, so did he.
I liked and respected Hussman. I also understood why he gave to his alma mater. He wanted to rebuild trust in journalism and felt the best way to do that was by preparing young journalists to be objective reporters who relied on facts to tell the story — not opinion. This fueled a well-worn debate about reporters’ motivations in shaping a story. His perspective was seen as narrow by the new generation of reporters, many of whom were women and people of color and who chose journalism so that underreported viewpoints would finally make it into the mainstream.
It also led to a narrative of a rich, white male leader using his influence and prestige to demand a university reject a highly successful Black woman journalist. It was a nightmare.
Deciding whom to support, however, wasn’t hard. I respected Hussman‘s desire to rebuild trust in journalism, but I also believed that a large donation should never buy decision-making power.
By contrast, Nikole Hannah-Jones was a once-in-a-generation journalist who received the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary and wide acclaim for her work on the 1619 Project. I had persuaded her to join our faculty and now she was embroiled in a high-profile clash she didn’t ask for.
I felt Hussman was a reasonable man and would back off if the right group of leaders made the case. Unfortunately, despite my increasingly plaintive pleas, none of my superiors had an honest conversation with Hussman about his interference in faculty decisions — a situation that was likely exacerbated by pandemic isolation. But powerful donors want to talk to the most powerful players on a campus. A dean, especially a woman dean, is unfortunately not perceived as having that power.
In the months that followed, Hussman did dozens of media interviews, believing that as a news executive he shouldn’t avoid speaking with the press. His remarks were often insulting to Hannah-Jones and infuriating for the school’s faculty. It became the classic story of a rich donor trying to exert power because his money gave him a platform.
Heading Off Donor Revolts
That brings us back to today’s “donor revolt,” once again featuring white wealthy donors publicly attacking their alma maters’ leadership, this time over concerns about antisemitism on campus. This is uncomfortable to watch and not a good look for philanthropy. But it is also a wakeup call that should lead to new ways of doing business — new rules and new, occasionally uncomfortable, conversations about expectations, values, and the role of donors.
University leaders and development staff can start by asking themselves some basic questions: How do you honestly recruit alumni, business leaders, and foundations to support an institution’s larger mission without selling out? How do you take their money and make it clear that they don’t control how it’s spent? How do you candidly create a relationship in which financial investments are not theirs to control? What do you do when a donor’s political, emotional, or personal agenda doesn’t align with your institution’s goals, whether those of a university or other nonprofit?
These are not easy questions to answer, but I wish I had asked them out loud. The dance for dollars requires greater honesty from the start. There is no room for ambiguity in these relationships.
My own experience with a big donor who gave his name, his reputation, and his funds to our school should have included a more specific executed written agreement beyond the contract we used to outline the gift and its timing. That agreement should have made it clear that Hussman wouldn’t have a say in hiring, firing, or setting an agenda and should have been signed by him, the university president, and the dean.
This might not have stopped large donors at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania from embarking on their pressure campaign, but it would have put them on notice and made clear where influence and academic integrity intersect.
Development professionals trying to bring in big dollars may understandably object to this approach. It’s a lot easier for fundraisers to ingratiate themselves with a donor and gush about their gift and its power. Asking them to sign a “no influence” clause could make their jobs harder and scare away some donors.
But it’s a necessary step.
Fundraising is a big business, and wealthy individuals are not simply altruistic. A new template for good giving between institutions dependent on donors and those who give must emerge from this painful public shaming of university leaders. Donors must understand that their contributions don’t buy anything within a university besides supporting higher education’s mission to create knowledge, to question everything, to unsettle conventional thought, to research the past, and to discover the future.
Ultimately, I think Walter Hussman came to understand that. He reached out to me at the end of a very uncomfortable battle — after Hannah-Jones finally won tenure and then opted to turn it down. He had heard me argue in a television interview that Hannah-Jones was an asset for our students, our business, and our school. He told me he still didn’t agree with me, but he admired my stand.
More donors need to recognize that their role is to affirm and to continue that great American university tradition: to be a place where people can disagree and still respect each other.