Introduction
Members of the Board of the IU Foundation. This will be my last report to you as IU President and as Chair of this Board. Last month, I presented to the broad university community my 14th and final State of the University address. I know that the Foundation sent you a link to the online version of this address, and printed copies will be sent to all of you soon. So, I will resist the temptation to repeat the whole 14,000-word address, which clocks in at 95 minutes, and will instead just make a few summary comments concerning some of the matters on which I reported in my address.
Admittedly, it was bittersweet to deliver my last address after serving for 14 years as president of this great university and for 24 years—more than a third of my life—in senior positions at IU. At the same time, it was a great honor and a privilege, as I am immensely proud of all that has been accomplished at the university during my presidency.
Although IU is emerging from a global pandemic—thanks to the strength and resolve all members of the IU community have demonstrated over these difficult past 15 months—the state of the university is strong. In fact, it is hard to identify a time when we have been better positioned for success.
IU offers an excellent, affordable education on campuses around the state to students from all backgrounds from Indiana and far beyond. The student body has never been more diverse, and our student population is currently more diverse than the state of Indiana itself.
Student debt is declining—thanks, in large part, to our pioneering financial literacy programs that now serve as models for many other colleges and universities around the nation—and financial aid support is at record levels.
During the 2020-21 academic year, IU granted a record of more than 24,200 degrees, surpassing the previous record of just under 24,000 in 2018-19. This represents an extraordinary 31 percent increase over the number of degrees awarded in 2007-08.
And this number is fueled, in part, by the substantial increases in the number of IU students who have persisted to graduation because of improved academic counseling and increased financial aid.
In fact, after the enthusiastically welcomed return of IU's in-person commencement ceremonies on all of our campuses across the state last month, more than 308,000 IU degrees have awarded over the past 14 years and around 50,000 of these have been to students of color. More than 212,000 of these, or almost 70 percent, have been earned by Indiana residents. IU continues to educate more Indiana residents, by far, than any other college or university in the state.
Following the most extensive academic restructuring that our university has ever seen, IU has made available extensive new, contemporary and relevant degree programs and fields of study, both in-person or online.
Research is being funded at record levels, and, more than ever before, IU faculty are turning this intellectual property into new products and companies through a bold new entrepreneurial spirit within the university.
New facilities to support research and education abound on all IU campuses, and infrastructure across all campuses has never been better.
The creative and performing arts are flourishing, and are set to blossom again next semester when our pandemic restrictions are lifted.
Our vast, unique, and invaluable collections are being brought to the forefront of IU’s scholarly enterprise in new and renovated facilities.
Information technology at IU continues to define the cutting edge for other universities as it has for decades.
IU has never been more engaged in the health and welfare of the people of Indiana through the health sciences and IU Health, as has been clearly seen through the present pandemic.
We are among the country’s top leaders in international engagement and scholarship.
Record levels of private philanthropy
And of course, there has been the overwhelming success of private philanthropy at Indiana University over the last 14 years.
You have all heard me say repeatedly over this time that private philanthropy is one of the great pillars of the American system of higher education, making it the finest in the world. For IU, this was stunningly demonstrated by the huge success of IU’s record-breaking Bicentennial Campaign which concluded last September. This outstanding campaign far surpassed its original goal of $2.5 billion and its revised goal of $3 billion, raising nearly $4 billion. It was by far the largest campaign in IU’s history and one of the largest ever for a public university in the United States.
The overall level of support we saw in the campaign sent a loud and resounding signal to the world of how strongly committed IU alumni, friends, and supporters are to the university's future success—as the Bicentennial Campaign was one of only a very few campaigns at public universities to achieve success on this scale, among them being campaigns at Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Michigan.
Moreover, IU’s previous two campaigns for IU Bloomington and IUPUI were completed in 2010 and 2013, respectively, and raised $1.1 billion and $1.4 billion. So, in the last 14 years a total of over $6 billion has been generously given philanthropically to IU.
Here again, I want to thank the members of the Foundation Board—not only for your own generous contributions to these campaigns—but also for your leadership that helped make all of them all so successful.
Those who have served as president and CEO of the IU Foundation over the last 14 years—Gene Tempel, Dan Smith, and current interim CEO J T. Forbes—as well as the outstanding staff of the Foundation and the campus leaders, deans and development officers across the university, deserve our most grateful thanks for all their contributions to this record-setting philanthropic success.
Challenges and opportunities
The end of the Bicentennial Campaign is a time to reflect on not only what was successful, as is being done now, but also challenges and opportunities for philanthropy at IU in the future. As this is my last report to you, this seems an appropriate time for me to do this, drawing on my 14 years as IU President and Chair of this Board, and 24 years as a member of the senior leadership of the university.
Without a doubt, one of the reasons for the enormous success of the Bicentennial Campaign was the fact that it was an all-university campaign, involving every campus and major unit of the university, all of which had goals, against which their progress was carefully and regularly monitored and scrutinized. Those falling behind progress in achieving these goals were given additional attention and help by the campus leadership and the Foundation. It was the first time ever that the full resources of the university were thrown behind one campaign with every member of the university community working in a unified way toward a single goal with maximum effort.
In this regard it must be regarded as an overwhelming success. There will be needs in the future for specific campaigns in certain areas or units, but the success of the Bicentennial Campaign makes it irrefutably clear that all future major IU campaigns must be all-university campaigns to achieve maximum success. There is, of course, considerable time to conceptualize the next IU campaign and its themes, but the success and experience of the Bicentennial Campaign provides an excellent base from which to plan it. A thorough analysis of all aspects of the Bicentennial Campaign and the future needs of the university will occupy a lot of this board’s and the university’s thinking for the next few years—and this process has already been initiated with the engagement of Grenzebach, Glier & Associates to carry out a comprehensive review of the campaign and to make recommendations for future ones. But, given the success and experience of this campaign and IU’s alumni base of over 730,000—one of the largest in the nation—there is no reason why IU can’t aim for a campaign with goals as large as any set by a public university in this country, which by the way is Berkeley at $6 billion.
In carrying out the analysis of the Bicentennial Campaign and what can be done even better for the next major campaign, many factors will, of course, be reviewed and scrutinized. I want to focus on two of these.
The first is diversity in a number of senses. Here, the Women’s Philanthropy Leadership Council, the Black Philanthropy Circle and the Queer Philanthropy Circle have played an exemplary and very successful role in diversifying the philanthropic reach of the Foundation and its board. In some ways though, this is just the beginning, and there is much more to be done.
But in addition, there is also what I will call the “academic diversity” of the Foundation, and here there is also considerable work to be done. The goal here should be to ensure that every major academic and other unit of the university is represented in some way in the Foundation, through membership of the board or in some other way. These units are the campuses—seven to nine, depending on how you define them—all the 25 major schools on the IU Bloomington and IUPUI campuses—especially important given all the new schools and other academic units that gave been formed—and about another 10-12 major units on these campuses or within the university. At the moment, such representation falls well-short of being comprehensive. However, they must all be fully engaged to ensure the total philanthropic potential of IU is reached in the next campaign. One critical reason for this is that the campuses and schools are what are called under IU’s budgeting system, the “responsibility centers”—that is, the “profit and loss centers”—who have responsibility for generating revenue and making expenditures to support their missions. These responsibility centers are where the great bulk of all the fund-raising within the university takes place and hence, they all need to “have a seat at the table” when it comes to developing IU’s philanthropic strategy.
The second is international philanthropic engagement. There are two fundamental facts here. First, the domination by the United States of the world’s wealth is declining. According to Forbes, China now has nearly as many billionaires as the U.S., while the number in the rest of Asia has increased rapidly as well, and the number in Europe continues to grow.
Second, IU now has a significant international alumni base with around 50,000 international alums, whose organization through chapters of the IUAA and the establishment of the IU international gateways, and cultivation through personal visits by myself, vice presidents, deans and many others, has been carried out energetically over the 14 years of my presidency. But this is only a start. This process, like all philanthropy, has a very long-time horizon measured not in a few years but in generations, and our investment and engagement will need to be sustained over this period and not become the casualty of short-term thinking.
As with the issue of academic diversity that I just described, the right way needs to be found to represent IU’s international alumni in IU’s ongoing philanthropic efforts and activities. This is not simply a matter of finding a few international alums to be members of the board, or setting up a small international committee as before which achieved little. What is needed instead is a mechanism that aligns the philanthropic engagement of IU’s international alumni with the university’s international strategy—as overseen by the IU Office of International Affairs under the leadership of Vice President Hannah Buxbaum. Here painstaking work has been done over many years to identify IU’s priority countries and institutions based on factors like where IU’s international students come from and reside after graduation, where IU’s students study abroad, the institutions with which many of our faculty collaborate, etc.
One way we planned to do this during the Bicentennial was to have the first ever meeting of the council of international alumni chapter presidents last June, but unfortunately this was yet another casualty of the pandemic. But I certainty commend revisiting this initiative as a comprehensive and representative way of beginning a more systematic engagement of our international alumni in the activities of the Foundation.
Finally, there is the issue of the structure of the Foundation itself. In my nearly a quarter of a century at IU, I am not aware that we have ever asked the question of whether the Foundation is still organized in the best way for fund-raising, cultivation, and the efficient use of resources of what is after all now a $40 million organization. This question may, in fact, never have been addressed.
I raise it because not every large public university is organized the way IU is with its philanthropic arm organized as a separate stand-alone entity with parallel internal services to the university. The University of Michigan, for example, has all of the functions of the IU Foundation within the university itself, without the need for parallel services. This certainly hasn’t affected their philanthropic efforts as they raised a public university record in the Big Ten of $5.28 billion in their recently concluded campaign. And this type of organizational structure is seen at about half of the other institutions in the Big Ten. It was certainly not the right time to address these fundamental questions while we were in the midst of our recent campaign. But now is, I think, the perfect time to address them, well in advance of the next campaign. Fiscal responsibility and the best long-term interests of the university, in my view, dictate this, especially given that to the best of my knowledge, as I noted, it has never been done before.
Conclusion
So, these are a few of the challenges and opportunities I see ahead for the IU Foundation and for philanthropy more generally at IU based on a 24-year career in senior leadership at the university. But, due to the relentless hard work of all in the Foundation, thousands of individuals across the university, and the peerless generosity of all of you, I am immensely confident that these challenges will be surmounted, and these opportunities vigorously and eagerly grasped.
As I underscored in my State of the University address, IU has reached a watershed moment. The scale of success we have achieved together over the past 14 years has prepared IU to take the next bold step forward and join the very top ranks of America’s greatest universities.
This is the ultimate opportunity and the challenge that lies tantalizingly within Indiana University’s grasp.
I am extremely confident that IU is well positioned to leverage the strengths of its new and innovative schools and programs; its outstanding faculty; a talented and engaged student body; the dedication of its staff, its academic centers; and indeed, all of its collective assets, as well as the generosity of its alumni and friends, to sustain and build upon its enormous success over more than 200 years.
I am deeply grateful to all of you for all that you contribute to our university’s success and progress.
Thank you very much.