Introduction

It is a real pleasure to be with you today, first because you are all wonderful people and, second for reasons that I shall explain in a minute.  I know you are special people because my own Director of Development, Kitty Chisholm, who is here today, makes an absolutely extraordinary contribution to the Open University.

She inspires our development in the fullest sense of that overworked word.  Some of the most successful new units and new programmes during my time at the Open University have been Kitty’s initiatives.  If you are all doing work like that you are worth your weight in platinum to your universities.

So being here is a pleasure for me. But for you there is good news, bad news and worse news.  This is a lunch or, if you want to be proper, a luncheon.  Since a key task is to see what you are eating and drinking the good news is that I shall not inflict on you death by Powerpoint.

The bad news is that this is a ‘management luncheon’ which is a new oxymoron for my collection – along with airline food and a ‘short speech by a university vice-chancellor’. The worse news is that this is a management luncheon with a speech.

Whenever I get up to speak after a meal there rings in my ears the story told of an event in the Coliseum in Rome in the Emperor Nero’s time.  In those days the early Christians were made to fight lions in the arena to amuse the emperor and titillate the crowd.  On this day the Christians had been led into the arena, the crowd was in an uproar of anticipation, and the lions were let in and charged toward the Christians.  One of the Christians was seen to step forward and say something to the leading lion, whereupon all the lions lay down in the sand.  The crowd roared and booed but the lions wouldn’t budge.  Finally the Emperor Nero called the Christian over to him and asked him, “What did you say to the lion?”  “I told him there would be speeches after lunch”, replied the Christian.

However, you did ask for this – or at least the conference organisers did – so here we go.  It is a real pleasure to be here – even in the after-lunch slot - for two reasons.

First, I have great respect for CASE and I value the work that its members do, both individually and collectively, for higher education.  It was a former CASE President, James Fisher, onetime president of Towson State University in Maryland, who wrote what is still, for my money, the best book on being a university president.  Its title is simply The Power of the Presidency.

I reread parts of it regularly and whenever one of my vice-presidents is shortlisted for a presidency, I get them to read it.  It paints the president as a somewhat paternalistic figure, in the American style, but those from more collegial systems can apply mutatis mutandis on that.

I guess to be politically correct I should have said parentalist rather than paternalist but, what the heck, the American university presidents I’m thinking of are much more paternal than maternal.

One of the strengths of Fisher’s book is some very good chapters on how a president can gain and use power and deal with various key university stakeholders such as students, faculty, alumni, football coaches and even – most usefully - advancement and development officers.  I’ll say no more.

The second reason for my pleasure is that we are in Canada.  It’s always a thrill to come back to this remarkable country.  Every year it seems that the United Nations human development index ranks Canada first in the world for quality of life.

Whenever I’m here, as I was on a three-week vacation last year, I can see why.  Today we often use that elusive term, the civil society.  I’ve been to some sixty countries and yet it seems to me that Canada continues to show all of them what a civil society really is.

I also admire the contribution that Canadians make to the discourse about globalisation.  Canadians are ideally placed to understand this phenomenon.  Canada is a very large landmass with three oceans lapping its shores.  It is a nation of immigrants, home to people from all over the world and still today, I believe, the country that is accepting the largest number of new immigrants pro rata to its population.

Because they share a continent and a long border with the United States, Canadians understand Americans, who tend to treat Canadians as honorary Americans anyway.

I guess that’s the way that Americans recompense Canadians for putting up generously with the occasional cultural insensitivity.  The most common form it takes – and it is rampant at this conference – is for Americans to say “In this country” when they mean “In the United States”.

I realise how easy it is to do.  Yesterday all Canadians will have noticed the irony – yet I suspect very few Americans did – that when Elaine Chao was lecturing us on cultural stereotypes and sensitivity she referred, on three separate occasions, to “in this country” when she was talking about the USA.

I do urge our American colleagues to work hard on this elementary lapse of courtesy.  Using those three words “in this country” to mean the USA when you are not in the USA can undo in a second all your attempts to be friendly and culturally sensitive.

If you will all resolve never to do it again I will let you into a secret and reveal one of the ways that Canadians get back at you for saying “in this country” when you are not.  When a Canadian speaker begins a presentation by talking effusively about how wonderful it is to have so many friends from south of the border in the audience – be careful.

What the speaker is doing is looking around the audience to see how many Americans glance around furtively trying to locate some of the Mexicans that they hadn’t noticed before!  But I digress.

Americans treat Canadians as honorary Americans and to the extent that globalisation includes a large dollop of Americanisation, Canadians are familiar with it.

But since trading with the rest of the world is a relatively much more important phenomenon for Canada than it is for the United States, Canadians are more aware of, and involved with, the rest of the world than their American neighbours.

Finally, it has been well said that the United States is the country that is first into the future and last out of the past.  Canada, by contrast, always seem very well adapted to grappling with the present.  And, after all, the present is where we all have to live.

This unique perspective must explain the tremendous current vigour of Canadian writing.  I know that the British literary scene envies Canada the quality of the fiction being written in this country today.  And the two non-fiction books that have impressed me most in the last two years have both been Canadian.  I shall draw on them both in these remarks.

This is a management lunch so I must talk about management.  However, I’m not going to talk about the day-to-day management of the advancement function.  This North American continent is awash with money so I’m sure that you are all doing very nicely, thank you.  If things are not going your way then I won’t add to your troubles with free advice – which is worth what you pay for it – but simply leave you with the thoughts of three politicians.

If things are in a mess be philosophical and treasure the profound comment of the leader of Polish Solidarity, Lech Walesa, who said:

“It's easy to turn an aquarium into fish soup, but not so easy to turn fish soup back into an aquarium.”

If on the other hand you feel you have your back to the wall, then remember the advice of the former British Prime Minister, John Major, that:

“When you have your back to the wall you must turn round and fight.”

Whereas if you are fearful of what lies ahead I commend the timeless statement of the famous African leader Sekou Touré when he declared:

“Two years ago at independence our country stood at the edge of the abyss.  Since then we have taken a giant step forward”.

But enough of levity.  One of the tasks of managers and leaders is to keep their antennae tuned to the changing environment in order to pick up trends that will impact their activities.  That will by my focus.  I’ve taken as my title Do universities deserve to be given money?  I shall flag three trends which are may make universities less deserving of the funds that you try to raise for them.

Why do people give money to universities?  Here I’m not talking primarily about students who pay fees, or governments who buy research and teaching, or companies who buy research and training.  I shall concentrate on those who give money without strings or with only a vague specification of deliverables, notably the alumni.

As professionals in the field you will have a much more sophisticated taxonomy of the reasons people give to universities than I do, but let me identify four reasons from my own experience.

First, people give money to take advantage of the monumental function of universities.  They provide funds for campuses or buildings that they hope will contribute to the greater glory of God - or of themselves.

The colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are nearly all either named in honour of the Christian faith, for example, Corpus Christi, All Souls, Trinity; or of major donors, for example King’s, Queen’s, Wolfson.  Your own campuses are redolent with buildings carrying the names of those who paid for them.

Second, people give money to promote a subject or activity that they hold dear.  This may be to help their industry directly, as in a professorial chair in computing, or it may be more disinterested if the chair is in philosophy or art history.

Third, they donate in order to help the next generation, perhaps by paying for something that will improve student life on campus or help a particular section of the student body like those with disabilities.

Fourth, people give because to show general support for the values and traditions of universities.

I’m sure that you could extend that list but it will serve my purpose.  I haven’t distinguished in that list between individual donors and corporate bodies but I learned on reading about the recent record donation of $64 million to McGill by Richard Tomlinson that today the really big sums are tending to come from individuals.

So what are the trends that might make such people less willing to direct their money to universities rather than to the many other good causes?

The first is obvious, but if there has been serious discussion of its implications for giving then I’ve missed it.  I speak the multiplication of for-profit universities and for-profit ventures involving not-for-profit universities.

If a university exists to return value to its shareholders I would imagine that it is unattractive to donors.  They might want to invest in the business and get a direct return on their funds but they are unlikely to donate money, unless they are desperate to have their name on a building, if they know that the main effect of their donation will be to spare the shareholders that particular expenditure and enable them to take greater profits.

That case is straightforward.  Rather less straightforward are the for-profit subsidiaries being spawned by many public and private but not-for-profit institutions.  If all the profits are covenanted to the parent university there isn’t a big problem, but if other shareholders and partners are taking money out of the subsidiary enterprise then some donors to the parent may begin to wonder if they are being taken for suckers.

How easy is it to give donors a categorical assurance that none of the real costs or opportunity costs that their donations are saving the parent university are leaking away into the profits that third parties are taking out of the subsidiary?  Doubtless some of you have faced the issue.  Maybe it’s not an issue.

Maybe donors agree with Dr Samuel Johnson that people are never so innocently engaged as when making money.  However, I think it will be an issue for European universities which are mostly in their infancy are far as serious fund-raising is concerned.

The second trend that may prove to be a turn-off for donors is more complex and I hope I can explain it properly.  The general issue is the relationship between universities and brands.  I mean both universities’ links with external brands like Molson’s, McDonald’s and Microsoft and the relationship between a university and its own name when it promotes that name as a brand, as in the U of T brand or the Florida State brand or the Open University brand.

In this context I recommend the first of the two Canadian books that I have so admired.  Its title is No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies and it is powerfully and beautifully written by Naomi Klein, who is a young journalist here in Toronto.  To summarise in two minutes the key issues from her well-structured 400-page argument is a challenge but let me try.

The first point is that corporations increasingly act as if shareholder value is the only thing that counts.  Share price – or the level of dividends in old-fashioned firms that still pay them – are what determine the compensation of the CEO and how the board measures its success.

Disappearing fast are the days when corporations concerned themselves about other stakeholders such as their employees, the communities in which they operate, their suppliers, their dealers, or even their customers – if they can get a greater profit margin on some other customer.

The second, related point is the change in what the brand stands for.  Time was when a brand stood for the quality of a product.  No longer.  Brands are now divorced from products.  Making the actual product, if it is physical like running shoes or a disk drive, is now often outsourced to sweatshops in the export processing zones of the third world.

If it is an intangible product like software it is produced by young graduates of our universities on short term contracts.  The stock options that made their bosses rich are either underwater or a thing of the past.

Having split the brand from the product the firms then attempt, by spending very large sums of money, to endow the brand with mystical qualities.  The money comes from the savings made by using sweatshops or insecure youngsters for production.

The money goes to create and maintain associations between the brand and soft focus themes like values, aspirations culture, lifestyle and so on.  This means that there is no limit, except advertising spend, to the space that the brand can fill.

When a brand becomes a balloon of fantasy rather than a surrogate for product quality it is easy to prick it or parody it, as the Canadian group adbusters does to such effect.  This means that the firm must try to suppress dialogue about the brand by libel actions and copyright lawsuits against anyone who takes the name of the brand in vain.

My conclusion is that universities should sup with a long spoon if they do business with the aggressive brands that seek to dominate public space through a monologue to which people can’t answer back.

Naomi Klein’s argues that universities stand for a set of values that are very important to society but inimical to this modern spirit of branding.

First, universities are some of our most important public spaces, both literally and metaphorically.

Second, they are expressions of collective responsibility.

Third they are institutions where open debate should be prized.

Fourth, because of all these qualities, they are places where transparency should be valued.  Allowing corporate brands into the university tends to undermine all these qualities.  We should not turn campuses into shopping malls and student citizens into student consumers, however tempting the corporate money might be.

I do realise that being prevented from buying Pepsi Cola on campus because Coca Cola has an exclusive contract might seem a small price to pay to get a regular supply of shirts for the basketball team but the encroachment is insidious.

There is also the real likelihood of a student backlash if their university associates itself with a prominent brand that engages in dubious practices such as making its product in the sweatshops of the export processing zones of the third world, restricting freedom of speech through libel and copyright lawsuits, or engaging in predatory commercial practices.

And it may not just be the students.  The first faculty member that I am aware of who resigned his position in protest against advertising on campus was a professor at the Université de Montréal where I once taught myself.  The act does credit to him and discredit to the University that allowed its classroom blocks to be plastered with advertising.

My guess is that turning the campus into a shopping mall and the university into an extension of commercial brands will be a turn-off for alumni and donors too.

They want to think of their university as a special place and I suggest that some of the ways they want it to be special are the four qualities I just mentioned: public space, collective responsibility, open debate and transparency.

It follows that we should all be careful about getting too carried away by using the language of brand about our universities.

Sure, it’s OK as a way of showing that we are with it and able to talk the fashionable business language of the day.  But the process I have described, whereby brands exist in a fantasy world divorced from the product they purport to represent, is a particularly dangerous one for us.

If the research on our campus is third-rate and the student experience is lousy no amount of branding is going to fool sponsors or students for very long.  We would do well to concentrate on the basics.

So much for the depressing effects on donors of the rise of for-profit universities and the invasion of our campuses by brands.  My third point is more profound and concerns the purpose and style of what universities do.

Here I recommend my second Canadian reference, John Ralston Saul’s magisterial book, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West.   He argues that since the Enlightenment we have perverted the use of reason by confusing it with technocratic expertise.  We have become a society that wants instant answers from experts to each new question.

Saul argues that a mature society should often prefer to live in doubt rather than put its faith in instant answers.

Whether we give our students answers or teach them to ask questions says a lot about how we really view them.  Thomas Jefferson, who is arguably the greatest public figure that the modern world has produced, said that humanity divides into two groups.

There are those who fear and distrust the people and those who identify with the people and have confidence in them.  I suspect that many people who give money to universities believe, even if they do not articulate it this way, that universities should be in the camp of those who have confidence in the people.

Those who have confidence in the people have always argued that consciousness is the key to improvements in the human condition.  However, our power structures usually see the consciousness of the citizenry as a danger which must be lulled and channelled towards the inoffensive and superficial.

We each have our views on where to raise the consciousness of our fellow citizens.  The point of raising the consciousness of our graduates is not to channel them in a particular direction but to encourage the general civic consciousness that is the foundation for decent democracy.

Such graduates can provide a vital counterweight to the false certainties of the experts.  John Ralston Saul recalls that for the Romans sensus communis meant humanity and sensibility as well as common sense.

Our more restricted use of the term common sense is, as he puts it, ‘the narrowing effect of a civilisation which seeks automatically to divide through answers when our desperate need is to unify the individual through questions’.  I was proud of the broadening impact of the Open University when a graduate told me, with a mixture of pride and exasperation, that since doing an OU degree he couldn’t see less than six sides to any question.

Unifying individuals through questions, rather than indoctrinating students with ready answers, is the real task of universities.  Dedication to that task, rather than a fixation on the short-term needs of employment, is also more likely to attract donors to give to our universities.

As advancement professionals you have a particularly interesting role within your universities.  On the one hand you serve as the twitching antennae of the university, noting all the contemporary trends and developments and flagging the opportunities they present to bring resources and reputational benefits to the institution.

On the other hand you are, through your relations with the alumni, an anchor preventing the university from coming adrift from its past.  In short you are, as I said about the USA a few minutes ago, both first into the future and last out of the past.

But you must also, as in my compliment to Canada, be good at living in the present.  I titled these remarks Do universities deserve to be given money?  You must help ensure that they do.

I have sketched three important choices in that regard.  First the choice between public good and private profit; second, the choice between the illusory security of brands and the real assurance of quality; and third, the choice between the false reassurance of immediate answers and the true challenge of facing lasting questions.

Above all, be confident.  There are good statistical grounds for supposing that universities will bury their critics.  A generation ago Clark Kerr's Carnegie Commission found that, and I quote:

“Taking, as a starting point, 1530, when the Lutheran Church was founded, some 66 institutions that existed then still exist today in the Western world in recognisable forms: the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, the parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, and 62 universities... They have experienced wars, revolutions, depressions, and industrial transformations, and have come out less changed than almost any other segment of their societies.”

Do not take that as an excuse for complacency, still less as a basis for proclaiming the infallibility of university development officers.  Do take it as evidence that the fundamental academic ideal that drives universities strikes a deep chord in the human spirit.  Our universities will deserve to be given money if they remain true to that ideal.

Winston Churchill once remarked that the United States will always do the right thing - after having exhausted all other possibilities.  I urge you to exhaust as quickly as possible those avenues for fund-raising that are really diversionary ephemera and then do the right thing.

That is to hold up a vision of the university that expresses confidence in people and nourishes the human spirit.

I wish you all well in your important work.

References

Fisher, JL Power of the Presidency, ACE
Klein, N No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies Flamingo Press
Saul JR Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West Penguin

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