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With enrollment at an all-time high, a new $15 million residence hall just opened, a second one refurbished for nearly $12 million, at least three new academic buildings on the drawing board and millions more being spent or budgeted for improvements – and state funding for higher education in a years-long decline – the question has never seemed more pressing:
Just where are the dollars coming from?
The short answer: from more places, and in greater numbers, than at any time in the past.
It has been a little more than two years since Marty Meehan took over as chancellor, and just 18 months since his inaugural. In that time, the new administration, while presiding over the largest student enrollment in the University’s history, as well as its most ambitious expansion plan ever, has also overseen a doubling of the UMass Lowell endowment – to more than $40 million – a more-than-doubling of its scholarship funds and a dramatic, unprecedented widening of its fund-raising outreach.
It began with the inaugural itself. “We're going to make more money for scholarships than any inauguration of a president has in any public college or university, in Massachusetts history,” vowed the chancellor at the time. And he did – with $1 million raised from a weeklong event that featured everything from student concerts to household-name guest speakers to a panel on climate change. The sponsor list, drawn from a blend of friends, alumni, charities, small businesses and big corporations – Raytheon, the New England Patriots, the Demoulas Foundation – was a broad, diverse mix of new hopes and old loyalties. By the end of the week, close to $700,000 had been added to the University’s scholarship pool.
That set the tone for what has been a remarkable 18 months. By the close of the 2008 fiscal year alone, the University had raised nearly $8.5 million in cash and pledges, $14 million in total support – far in excess of its goal. Within the UMass system, only Amherst by then exceeded the UMass Lowell endowment: close to $3,800 per student, a 65 percent increase in just five years.
That’s the big picture -- which, like most big pictures, is an amalgam of a thousand smaller ones. And it is among these smaller ones (some of them not so very small) that you find much of the richness and diversity that will take the University into its future.
Like the gift from Nancy and Richard Donahue, a $500,000 donation announced last spring, to create the University’s first-ever endowed professorship in the arts. Or the two $500,000 gifts – matched by a UMass trust fund – from Jim Dandeneau and Mark Saab, who graduated a year apart in the ’80s, used to fund two endowed professorships in “green plastics.” Or the $511,000 Dana McLean Greeley endowment, now in its second year, that is funding yearly campus visits by world-renowned peace activists. (“With this gift, we are institutionalizing peace,” said UMass Lowell Prof. Robert Gamache of the Greeley endowment.)
Or consider the $186,000 endowed scholarship, the product of gifts from literally hundreds of alumni, friends and colleagues, to honor former School of Health and Environment Dean David Wegman. Or the long-ongoing Hoff scholarships, the legacy of a gift of alumnus Charlie Hoff, that have helped put as many as 1,000 UMass students through school. Or – in a more future-looking vein – the Power of Possibility speakers series, kicked off this fall by the visit of a Google executive (Richard Miner, ’86) to showcase successful alumni and highlight their careers. Or the outpouring of gifts, which have never been so abundant, now coming from faculty and staff.
“There are just so many exciting things happening right now,” says Director of Undergraduate Admissions Kerri Johnston. “The speakers series, the new professorships, the new residence halls – they make us that much more visible, that much more attractive to students. And the new scholarships [being funded] – they tell the world out there that we recognize the need for assistance, especially in these times we’re all living through, and that we’re ready to step in ...
“I think what people are seeing is a university moving forward, a university on its way up. And that makes our job that much easier – that they want to be a part of that.”
(This is the last in a three-part series on enrollment. Check out the other two stories -- on student life and the more diverse student population.)