Reply to Howard University student protest -- rats, roaches, mold in student housing for $50k/yr

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Howard University student protest -- rats, roaches, mold in student housing for $50k/yr"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Didn’t they get a $40 mil donation recently?[/quote]

No one gives money to improve aging infrastructure. Big gifts like this are always earmarked for something specific—scholarships, a new academic center, research, professorships. And when gifts are for capital projects, it’s never dorms; donors get excited about state-of-the art academic buildings, stadiums, etc.

Mold remediation comes out of operating budget. [/quote]

Is that true? When we've toured colleges with our kids, more often than not the dorms have naming rights to donors. A famous example would be Princeton, where former eBay CEO Margaret Whitman, donated $30M for her own dorm. Houses 500 kids.

[img]https://pr.princeton.edu/pwb/07/1008/m/IMG_9597.jpg[/img][/quote]

I’m in higher ed fundraising at at a big-name school, and it’s certainly true in my experience. Clearly there are exceptions, and my “never” above should have said “rarely.”

Also, making a gift to construct a single, fancy dream dorm is very different from funding repairs to aging dorms, which was the larger point of my post. Donors fund splashy things or things that make for a strong story, and institutions know that they can’t credibly ask donors to pay for basic operational things (safe, functional living spaces) that are taken as a given.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics