Most important job for next UNC chancellor: How about raising $1B annually?

The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill raised a whopping $5 billion during its recent five-year Campaign for Carolina. Now, as the university searches for its next permanent chancellor, a prominent member of the school's search committee says that type of fundraising haul should be expected of the next leader.

"One billion dollars a year in fundraising," UNC Board of Trustees member Jennifer Lloyd told the committee focused on selecting chancellor candidates in June. "We have to be sober about that fact here: No matter how great the chancellor candidates, at the end of the day, the chancellor has a tangible deliverable goal on private giving."

During the Campaign for Carolina fundraising effort, the university raised more than $5.1 billion from more than 230,000 donors from October 2017 through December 2022. UNC believes it is the first public school in the South to complete a $5-billion campaign.

And the need for private dollars has only increased since with schools seeking increased funding for research, faculty salaries, student scholarships and campus buildings.

Former UNC chancellor Holden Thorp, who served from 2008 to 2013, told WRAL that during his tenure the university raised about $250 million annually.

“I used to say we have to raise a million dollars every day, but we take Saturday and Sunday off,” Thorp said. “That’s grown a lot since then.”

He added: "For a big-time university like Carolina, a billion dollars a year is not a crazy number."

Chancellor search

The June 11 Chancellor Search Advisory Committee meeting was focused on a “the leadership profile” for interested applicants that the committee has since made public in a lengthy document. Lloyd said that fundraising prowess should be used to weed out candidates and that it was not nearly prominent enough in the profile.

"Candidates deserve to know what is expected of them," Lloyd said.

Former Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz left UNC to become the president at Michigan State University on Jan. 12. He was initially named interim UNC chancellor in February 2019 and then became the permanent chancellor in October 2020.

Lee Roberts is the school's interim chancellor. Prominent Republican lawmakers, such as House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger — who are influential in the process that determine university funding — publicly called for Roberts to get the permanent job after his handling of campus protests in April.

The search committee, which was formed Feb. 12, must forward at least three candidates to the UNC Board of Trustees. The trustees will then submit three of those candidates to the UNC System Board of Governors and President Peter Hans, who makes the final decision. Roberts is eligible to apply for the position, but applications are not made public.

Roberts, a member of the UNC System Board of Governors before becoming interim chancellor, was the state's budget director under former Gov. Pat McCrory, a Republican. He is the founder and managing partner of SharpVue Capital, a Raleigh-based private investment firm.

The committee is scheduled to meet Wednesday and is making plans for an August meeting.

"The ambitious goal is to have someone named by the end of the calendar year," search committee member Beth Moracco told the Faculty Executive Committee on Thursday.

UNC’s search comes at a time of change across higher education with a number of high-profile universities across the nation also seeking new leadership.

Of the 17 schools in the UNC System, four had new chancellors start in 2024 and three others, including UNC, currently have interim leaders. North Carolina State University Chancellor Randy Woodson, who has been in his position since 2010, has a contract that runs through June 2025.

North Carolina Central picked its new chancellor less than six months after its search committee was formed in January. Karrie Dixon started at the Durham university on July 1.

"We are making sure that we're going with a fast enough clip to not lose some of the really, really strong candidates, given the market demands," said search committee chairwoman Christy Page, the dean of UNC's School of Medicine. "We'll take as long as it takes to find very strong candidates, but also fast enough that we don't lose candidates to the market."

Fundraising prowess

A 37-page “leadership profile” produced by the university — basically a job description, sales pitch and wish list for the right candidate — includes just one page on fundraising, touting the school's success during the Campaign for Carolina. It says "Carolina is in the planning phase of its next comprehensive fundraising campaign," which has an "anticipated public launch date" in the fall of 2027.

By contrast, the profile includes two pages dedicated to UNC athletics, including a page of photographs.

The two-page summary of the chancellor position includes 10 bullet points. The first is "a profound devotion to the public mission of UNC-Chapel Hill." None of the bullet points specifically mentions fundraising, although the ninth one calls for a leader with "fiscal prudence and operational expertise."

"Fundraising is very, very important," Page said. "But it's just one of the many qualities we will seek in our next chancellor."

Raising money falls on leaders across the university, said Brian O'Leary, a fundraising consultant who works with higher education institutions. Whether it's access to need-based scholarships, research or the expansion of programs, donors want to see and know how their money will be used, especially as the gifts get larger and larger.

"Donors are demanding sort of transformational and creative ways to push higher education to the next level, more so than you might imagine bureaucracies do," said O'Leary, senior vice president at Graham-Pelton Consulting Inc., which advises universities on large fundraising campaigns.

With particularly large donations, ones that can stretch into hundreds of millions of dollars, donors sometimes want assurances that can only come from the chancellor level.

“Somebody doesn’t want to write that really big check until the chancellor comes and says, ‘I’m going to stand behind this’ or sometimes there are very complicated organizational things that have to get worked out in order to close a gift and it requires the chancellor,” Thorp said.

UNC has an Office of University Development, which is tasked with fundraising, with one vice chancellor and seven associate vice chancellors leading an “always growing team,” its website says, dedicated to finding private support. Page said the chancellor's role is very important in securing both state and donor support.

"With respect to donors, they look to stable and inspired leadership to know that their gifts will be used as they intend, to be able to communicate our stories from our fantastic students and faculty and the way that they're changing the world and the way that they could potentially change the world with additional giving," Page said. "Those skills of connecting with people, particularly with donors, are very important for any leader and certainly the executive leader of our great university."

Thorp, the former chancellor at UNC, said when he started development staff told him they'd need "a day and a half a week" from him for fundraising. When Thorp left UNC, he went to Washington University in St. Louis as provost, where the chancellor spent even more time on fundraising.

"A big part of my job as the provost was to make sure that he had enough time to go do fundraising," said Thorp, now the editor-in-chief of the Science family of academic journals.

What's it for?

UNC’s all-funds budget was nearly $4.2 billion for the fiscal year that ended June 30. State lawmakers appropriated $622 million for operations in fiscal year 2023.

In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2020, which was during the Campaign for Carolina, UNC received $565 million in commitments including $424 million in cash.

"The emphasis and the reliance on fundraising for all universities, but in particular public universities, has grown in its importance over time," Page said. "We're grateful to be a public university where we do have the support of our taxpayers and state dollars. But with all of the pressures that go into keeping a university excellent and fulfilling its mission, the philanthropic support has become, I believe, more important as time has gone on."

Where do those donations go? It's a common question for chancellors and other school leaders, Thorp said. Most of it is raised for a specific purpose and not all of it is given right away. A lot of immediate donations, Thorp said, goes into research and other academic programs. Less than 5% of money that goes into endowments can be drawn each year.

"The universities put themselves in a very awkward position when they do these campaigns because they, on the one hand, brag about how much money they raised," Thorp said. "And then, on the other hand, they don't have a very good story when people come to them and say I need money for something and I want part of that $5 (billion) or $8 (billion) or $10 billion you just raised. It doesn't work that way.

"That's an un-fun conversation that every university leader has to have almost every day."

Each fundraising campaign tends to raise the bar for annual giving at universities. So the bar has been set at UNC by the Campaign for Carolina. With a potential new campaign beginning in 2027, the new permanent chancellor will likely be judged, at least in part, on the success — or failure — of that effort.

The timing works well, said O'Leary, the fundraising expert.

"They're probably waiting for the new chancellor to come do the strategic plan," he said. "And then that chancellor will then be like, 'OK, here's my vision.' And now we know how much we need to raise out of this and what we can do.

"When the big donors come into play, they want to meet the chancellor, look them in the eye and know they're feeling secure with the process."