Public Education, Private Money

One time, it began with a 14-foot totem pole.

Movie mogul Steven Spielberg and his wife, actress Kate Capshaw, received the icon as a gift but didn’t know where to put it. So three years ago, they offered it to UCLA’s University Elementary School, where it now stands on the playground.

That gesture caught the eye of university fund-raisers, who had been interested in the couple even before one of their children enrolled in the campus grammar school in 1992. “This gift would make the Spielbergs very happy and would be an ideal entree to them for major gift cultivation,” said a fund-raiser’s note to a confidential file.

Eventually, UCLA officials began brainstorming over how to woo the Spielbergs for multimillion-dollar gifts for the elementary school, the UCLA Medical Center--even underwater exploration. But they would have to be courted carefully, one school official cautioned, because the Spielbergs are “very skittish about being approached only because of their money and the use of their name.”

Such quests for private donations touch virtually every corner of the Westwood campus. A Times review of hundreds of confidential documents, including donor and alumni files, and interviews with fund-raisers offer a rare look at how one of the country’s most prestigious public universities pursues private money.

Invitation lists for public lectures double as donor tip sheets. The English Department moderates a book club targeted at the wives of entertainment and arts figures. Doctors at the world-renowned medical center help scout wealthy--and sometimes grateful--patients. Deans offer prospects seats on academic advisory boards.

Driving it all is a little-known network of 74 full-time development officers, university employees who helped bring in nearly $100 million last year. Although only a fraction of the $1.7-billion annual operating budget, UCLA officials say the money is needed to provide what they call their “margin of excellence.”

The school’s fund-raising activities, however, have come under scrutiny recently after reports that development officers sometimes served as a back channel for VIP admission requests from major donors and other influential people. UCLA officials have acknowledged that a “handful” of students were admitted each year based on such requests but said there was no direct exchange of favors for admissions.

UCLA officials say private money is necessary to augment state support, which since 1960 has shrunk from 61% to 23% of their budget. The remainder of the operating funds come mainly from student fees, federal research grants and revenues from dorms, parking, athletic ticket sales and hospital care.

Like it or not, UCLA officials say, the Westwood campus must look elsewhere for money for new buildings, research labs and professorial chairs. UCLA, in fact, is launching a record $1-billion fund-raising drive and last week announced the largest gift in UC history--$45 million for a new neuroscience research center. Officials said it took them more than 10 years to cultivate the donation.

“Private support has been a critical element in UCLA’s rise to excellence,” Chancellor Charles E. Young wrote in a letter to 3,400 donors last week in anticipation of this article.

“Indeed . . . private philanthropy has helped us supplement state resources, widening access and increasing quality,” he wrote. “Thus, private philanthropy is not inimical to our status as a public university; rather, it has been integral to our mission.”

Concern about raising private money played a role last week in a UC Board of Regents discussion about VIP admissions. Donors were exempted from a resolution the regents passed restricting themselves from “inappropriate” influence on admissions. In addition, UC President Richard C. Atkinson and others suggested considering giving each campus chancellor a small number of undergraduate slots for development.

Emulating Private Schools’ Tactics

In donations, UCLA lags behind UC Berkeley and cross-town rival USC--a private school that receives no state appropriations. Nonetheless, it is in the top tier of major universities, according to the New York-based Council for Aid to Education.

The future should bring in even more dollars, say UCLA officials. They expect significant gifts to flow from the wills of the school’s first bumper crop of alumni, who graduated from the 1940s to the 1960s. They also are trying to teach recent graduates and current students that they have a responsibility to give back to the university once they achieve success.

“We would hope that our alumni would see giving to this institution not simply as a way of giving back to UCLA, but a way of giving back to a state that has supported their education through subsidy to the university,” said Ted Mitchell, vice chancellor for academic planning and budget.

How UCLA attracts gifts, experts say, is no different than other major universities. After conceding fund-raising for generations to private universities, UCLA and other public institutions by necessity have adopted many of the techniques long used by such schools as Harvard and Stanford.

“From my vantage point, the way they go after private money, the way they have built up their fund-raising programs [is] fairly indistinguishable from the privates,” John Ford, Stanford’s vice president for development, said of UCLA, Berkeley and other public universities.

In Westwood, looking for donors now is a “team sport,” in the words of one UCLA fund-raiser. The ongoing effort involves deans, professors, doctors and trusted donors who provide leads on their friends.

Its backbone is the school’s development office, whose public employees are paid $35,000 to $87,000 a year out of private gifts or the chancellor’s discretionary funds. UC policy restricts the use of state money to pay development officers, school officials say.

UCLA’s staff of 74 full-time fund-raisers is comparable in size to Stanford’s, which raises twice the money of UCLA each year. The University of Michigan, which has 105 development officers, recently became the nation’s first public school to stage a successful $1-billion fund-raising campaign. UC Berkeley employs 62 full-time fund-raisers and USC, 90.

A number of UCLA’s fund-raisers work at the central development office on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood--telling people how to include the campus in their wills or using direct mail to seek no-strings-attached gifts. Most, however, are strategically positioned in departments and professional schools ranging from the AIDS Institute to the graduate business school.

No matter where they are, their work is recorded in vast paper and computer archives in the central office. Overall, 642,000 donors and prospects have been tracked since the 1950s.

A research team tends to the files, clipping newspaper society columns, searching databases and filing confidential memos that cover everything from solicitation strategies to insights volunteered by prospects’ friends.

Because 10% of the donors give 80% of the money, the research is crucial to tapping into the best prospects.

“It’s just like dating,” one former fund-raiser explained. “If you see a cute girl and you wanted to meet her, what would you do? It’s the same thing. It’s about developing a relationship with an individual.”

To strengthen that link, development officers may learn which prospect is nursing a private grief, who made the big business deal or who was seen wearing pricey designer clothes. The information trickles in from established donors--among them trustees of the private UCLA Foundation, a nonprofit organization set up to collect gifts on behalf of the university. The tipsters can be friendly lawyers, business associates, even one prospect’s accountant.

No detail is too small.

One memo indicated that a PhD student became a likely candidate after “faculty rumor was that she wore a $900 pantsuit to the department picnic.”

‘We Would Cast a Big Net’

Fund-raisers say most donors “self-identify,” eagerly stepping forward to give to UCLA because of its academic reputation and sports teams, or are mined from lists of alumni or parents of students.

Others must be wooed.

UCLA continually stretches beyond its base of 288,674 alumni to interest business and community leaders who have migrated to Southern California after attending school elsewhere.

For some, the door into giving is a cultural event, public lecture or honorary dinner--arranged by a fund-raiser who checks afterward to see which invitees pick up their name tags.

“I like to use the analogy of deep-sea fishing,” one current fund-raiser explained in an interview. “We would cast a big net. . . . These people are wide-open prospects who we didn’t know much about, but the fact that they came to these events indicated an interest in UCLA.”

Fund-raisers also use word of mouth, networking with established donors to identify which friends are approachable. Peer solicitation is crucial, say fund-raisers, and in the past, UCLA has given volunteer intermediaries scripted responses in some instances to help sway the prospects.

As the courtship continues, a development officer sometimes asks a dean to nominate an especially promising prospect to one of the school’s 50 advisory boards. The goal is to strengthen emotional ties to UCLA.

“They’re making . . . an emotional commitment and they have a sense of ownership,” a fund-raiser said.

Other tactics include arranging for would-be donors to sit in the chancellor’s box at football games, upgrading their seats for basketball games at Pauley Pavilion--or handling requests to “monitor” applications for admission or housing for their children and friends.

For Hisham Nazer, Saudi Arabia’s former oil minister, the strategy included dispatching videos of Bruin football games overseas in pouches sent through his country’s embassy.

When former hospital chain executive Richard Eamer, a USC graduate then in his 60s, expressed an interest in attending UCLA while he was being solicited for a $2-million gift, doors flew open. UCLA officials waived school policy to enroll him in a 1989 undergraduate psychology class.

“They were kind enough to let me sit in and find out that that’s something I didn’t want to do,” said Eamer, who dropped out after a few sessions.

Among the myriad approaches proposed by fund-raisers was the more personal tactic suggested for Santa Monica restaurateur Sylvia Wu, already a donor to the College of Letters & Sciences.

“Madame Wu has extremely strong feelings about the death of her daughter and she says that much of her travel is done to get away from the painful feelings,” a fund-raiser wrote after having dinner with the businesswoman in the late 1980s. Wu’s daughter, a UCLA grad who once worked at the UCLA Medical Center, died of breast cancer in 1979.

“It occurred to me that evening that a memorial fund set up in her daughter’s name to provide scholarships for Chinese students might encourage Madame Wu to upgrade her giving to UCLA, as well as to involve her friends, clients and family in the process.”

UCLA officials, who acknowledge that discussions about memorial funds are “delicate” but fruitful, said they approached Wu with the idea and she declined. The restaurateur said she does not recall the offer.

Another key fund-raising tool is called “recognition”--naming something in honor of a major donor. One former fund-raiser said he would name a blade of grass for a donor if that’s what it took.

“People want to leave their mark on something--’This is something that I did that’s here,’ ” said another fund-raiser.

UCLA used this method a few years ago when it targeted multimillionaire David Howard Murdock, now CEO of Dole Foods.

After Murdock bought a Bel-Air mansion and began constructing a Wilshire Boulevard building, one of his employees--former Nixon White House aide H.R. Haldeman, a UCLA graduate--told Young and a fund-raiser over lunch in 1981 that “if Harvard were to go after him, we might have some tough competition, but since we are in his backyard, we have one foot up,” the fund-raiser wrote.

Consultation with other business leaders, however, indicated that “any gift will have to enhance [Murdock’s] image,” a second memo said. “He does nothing simply from the goodness of his heart.”

The plan: Naming a new business school for Murdock in exchange for a $25-million gift. To that end, business school officials invited Murdock to join their advisory board, and the school’s dean and graduate faculty tutored his son, who attended UCLA. In 1986, they submitted a formal proposal to him for an “edifice” that would “stand majestically on the UCLA campus as an enduring monument to your generosity, achievements and aspirations for humankind.”

Murdock didn’t bite. Instead, his fascination with his brain apparently led the high school dropout to give nearly $1 million to brain researchers at UCLA who wooed him with personal seminars and a tour of their laboratories.

The change in approach came after an offhand remark by Murdock found its way into his donor file. “Mr. Murdock wanted to know why he, with just a 9th grade education, can carry so much information in his head . . . while his subordinates seem to require the services of a computer. . . . Murdock finds this strange--and very annoying.”

An aide said Murdock was unavailable for comment. UCLA officials say they have enjoyed a good relationship with the entrepreneur but admit that the comment in their files about his image was “inappropriate.”

In 1992, the literary interest of Judy Ovitz, wife of Disney Co. President Michael Ovitz, presented English department fund-raisers with another kind of “cultivation tool.” They launched a book club for Ovitz and her friends, whose monthly in-home meetings are moderated by a professor.

The Ovitzes would not comment, although records show that Ovitz asked her friends to open their checkbooks at one of the meetings. UCLA officials acknowledge that several club members are donors, but say they do not know if their largess and literary involvement are linked.

Through the years, one of UCLA’s biggest draws for donors has been the laboratory elementary school, where officials mine the financial potential of sometimes wealthy parents and grandparents.

When the Spielbergs showed up for a parent-teacher conference in May 1994, months after finding a home for their totem pole, then-Education School Dean Mitchell and a fund-raiser were ready to ask them to volunteer their time and financial support for the publicly subsidized school.

The couple’s interest did not go unnoticed elsewhere on campus. UCLA’s development chief convened a high-level strategy meeting a few months later.

During the session, the strategists agreed that the elementary school would proceed with a $3-million to $5-million request. The medical school, which had given Spielberg a VIP tour of the university hospital, would proceed on a “parallel” track. Their hopes didn’t end there.

The Provost of the College of Letters & Sciences suggested that Spielberg, director of the Indiana Jones action movies, might even be interested in donating to the Institute of Archeology--or perhaps marine research.

“His interest in the sea is reflected in his new restaurant, Dive, the submarine-shaped Century City restaurant that serves gourmet submarine sandwiches among other entrees,” a fund-raising memo says.

Through a spokesman, Spielberg said he was never pressured into gift-giving.

“No one has approached either myself or my wife for a large donation,” he said. “The money I have given to the [campus elementary] school in the past, I have given voluntarily in the best interests of my two children who attend that wonderful school.”

Fund-raising at the Center for Health Sciences, which includes the medical school and UCLA Medical Center, is even more successful than at the elementary school. The medical school and hospital account for almost half of private gifts to UCLA each year--from patients, their families, corporations and others impressed by the cutting-edge research and world-class care there.

“People want to live forever,” said Alan F. Charles, the vice chancellor who headed UCLA’s fund-raising effort until his retirement in 1993. “They’re just more interested in advanced research in cancer and cardiology than they are about English literature. It’s a survival thing.”

Sixteen development staffers are assigned to Health Sciences, but say they are careful not to intrude on the “sacred” doctor-patient relationship. Yet there is close cooperation with some physicians to identify and cultivate donors.

In 1986, a development officer wrote about her discussion with one doctor, who indicated that he planned to make an appointment with a patient, a prospective donor.

“[The internist] can call [the donor] and make one, and can detain her if necessary,” a fund-raiser wrote. “Will be discussing the need for surgery.”

The doctor’s attorney said his client never discussed the patient’s confidential history with the fund-raiser, nor conditioned his medical treatment on any discussion of a donation to UCLA.

Last year, retired advertising executive Milton Bradley Scott was in the hospital after a liver operation. A confidential memo said he and his surgeon had “several bedside discussions” about donations before the doctor presented a list of suggested gifts beginning at $1.5 million.

Scott said the discussions were his idea. “I said, ‘I want to do something for UCLA and yourself,’ and that’s how it came up,” he recalled recently. “I could have died as well as I could have lived. . . . I felt so indebted to his professionalism that I thought it prudent if, in my trust, I left some money to the medical foundation there.”

Using UCLA’s strengths to find others like Scott is part of the new fiscal reality, said a veteran fund-raiser.

“The perception of the public university living off the dole of the taxpayer has got to change,” she said.

Times researchers Janet Lundblad and Michele Buttelman contributed to this story.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Of Dollars and Diplomas

Among the country’s leading universities, UCLA ranks 22nd in private gifts received and 47th in private gifts collected per student enrolled. Figures are for 1995 and were released this week.

SCHOOL: TOTAL GIFTS

1. Harvard University: $323,406,242

2. Stanford University: $240,832,287

3. Yale University: $199,646,606

4. Cornell University: $196,736,229

5. University of Wisconsin, Madison: $164,394,458

6. Duke University: $155,164,009

7. Columbia University: $151,600,682

8. University of Michigan: $145,757,642

9. USC: $138,366,230

10. University of Pennsylvania: $135,324,761

15. UC San Francisco: $108,127,887

18. UC Berkeley: $103,088,570

22. UCLA: $98,163,606

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How major universities rank according to private dollars per student, a common measurement used in the development field.

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SCHOOL ENROLLMENT TOTAL GIFTS PER STUDENT 1. Caltech 1,982 $69,037,462 $34,832 2. UC San Francisco 3,729 $108,127,887 $28,996 3. Yale University 10,964 $199,646,606 $18,209 4. Harvard University 18,480 $323,406,242 $17,500 5. Princeton University 6,534 $103,826,392 $15,890 6. Stanford University 15,176 $240,832,287 $15,869 7. Dartmouth College 5,303 $81,694,462 $15,405 8. Brown University 7,801 $102,513,437 $13,141 9. Duke University 11,881 $155,164,009 $13,060 10. MIT 9,831 $107,937,812 $10,979 29. USC 28,185 $138,366,230 $4,909 41. UC Berkeley 29,634 $103,088,570 $3,479 47. UCLA 35,110 $98,163,606 $2,796

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Source: Council for Aid to Education, New York