Monday, Oct. 28 will mark the one year anniversary of the University launching its “This Is Not a Campaign” fundraiser, with the goal of raising $600 million for new projects on campus over the next two to three years. To date, the campaign has raised over $421 million, according to its website. Around $60 million of it has been donated to the University in the past year, with the rest having been raised as the campaign was developed and unveiled. These funds will go to the University’s endowment fund and various projects across campus, including academic grant programs and the science center on Church Street set to be completed in 2026.
“We went public last year at Homecoming,” President Michael Roth ’78 said. “The last couple years before that, we were fixing to get ready to [announce it], so we were raising money quietly for this campaign. It’s for facilities, financial aid endowment, money for academic programs, and athletics.”
On its website, the campaign features stories and information about the effects of giving. Donors can dedicate their giving to the financial aid endowment, student internships, the African Scholars Program, or leave it unrestricted.
The University spoke to the vitality of giving in enhancing the access and breadth of Wesleyan’s academic programs.
“We say, ‘This Is Not a Campaign. This Is Wesleyan,’” Vice President for Advancement Frantz Williams ’99 said in an interview with the Wesleyan University Magazine.“Because, just like Wesleyan is more than a place where you went to college, this effort is about more than dollars and cents.”
The naming of the campaign raised some eyebrows on campus last year, although many celebrated it as a tongue-in-cheek take on traditional fundraising campaigns.
“Wesleyan is not your ordinary liberal arts college, and to signal this, we make a point of scrapping the ordinary term ‘campaign’—the ordinary just doesn’t do justice to who we are and who we want to be,” Roth and Williams wrote in a message to the community last year.
The beginning of the campaign coincided with a number of physical improvement projects on campus, including the continued construction of the science center and the completion of the Frank Center for Public Affairs and the Zilkha Gallery.
“And we have the Science Building, the Frank Center, and the new Hamlin arts complex—some of the fundraising was for all those projects and a good chunk of it is for financial aid endowment,” Roth said.
As the campaign continues to approach its target, the University stressed the importance of donations as a way to achieve further long term goals.
“We hope to be done [in] two and a half years, but I think if we keep going, and it’s going well, we just keep going,” Roth said. “The goal would be to have a financial aid program that is strong enough that we didn’t have to worry about what people could pay when we made our admissions decisions, and that’s expensive. Our planned $600 million won’t get us there, but if we raise more than $600 million, we’ll get closer.”
Miles Craven can be reached at mcraven@wesleyan.edu.