Education

Stanford University has shut down its annual fund telephone fundraising program. You can visit the university’s official web page announcing the decision by clicking here. It’s all over the blog-a-sphere. It’s made headlines in publications for the nonprofit sector. For example, here’s a headline from The Chronicle of Philanthropy: "Stanford Hangs Up on Telemarketing—Will Others…

Every movement needs a spokesperson, and the school of "effective altruism," which argues that the most meaningful metric for weighing the value of a philanthropic gift is "lives saved per dollar" is no exception. We see this argument played out frequently in the arts world, where effective altruists will ask, "How many lives does the…

When Robert Morin, a University of New Hampshire alumnus who worked for nearly 50 years in the school's library, died in 2015, he left his entire $4 million estate to the university. The university school said it'd spend $100,00 on the library, $2.5 million on renovations to the student center and $1 million on a scoreboard for its new $25 million football stadium. That last bit has people very angry...

Earlier this week, Stanford University sent ripples though the fundraising community. Except this time it wasn't for a multimillion dollar gift announcement, it was to declare the end of its phonathon program. It sent communications to its alumni and friends that were clever and witty, grasping what many of our donors already feel about fundraising…

In 1838, two Jesuit priests, who served as presidents of Georgetown University, sold 272 slaves. The sale netted $115,000, or $3.3 million today, and helped pay the school's debts. On Sept. 1, Georgetown formally apologized for its role in the slave trade. The school said it would give an admissions preference to descendants of slaves owned by Maryland Jesuits, rename a pair of buildings and build a memorial. It was a nice attempt at reconciliation, but some 600 Georgetown slave descendants believe the university can do more...

It’s nice to see one of these scrappy liberal arts schools finally catch a break. With another two years to go, Harvard University’s latest fundraising drive has raked in $7 billion, the college said last week. Launched in 2013 with the goal of reaching $6.5 billion, Harvard’s haul broke the record Stanford previously set in…

The City University of New York is investigating whether a recent $500,000 donation intended to bolster the humanities and arts at its flagship school may have been improperly diverted. The inquiry was prompted by senior faculty members at the school, the City College of New York, who learned that an account that should have contained…

It’s hard to watch $38 million melt away. But that’s effectively what Marian University in Indianapolis has had to do. The small Roman Catholic university on the city’s west side secured a very public $48 million pledge from a wealthy donor at the beginning of the decade as it sought to expand with a new…

Months after he was supposed to give away more than $100,000 for college scholarships, Milo Yiannopoulos said all of the money is still sitting in his bank account. The Breitbart editor and professional political agitator (recently banned from Twitter for harassment) came under fire this week as allegations surfaced that his charity, which would provide…

In 2005, Vanderbilt conceded defeat in its legal battle to remove the word "Confederate" from one of its residency halls, which was built as Confederate Memorial Hall, but which the university prefers to call just Memorial Hall. The university had announced plans to remove the word in 2002, but the Tennessee chapter of the United…