Kenneth MacLean Cuthbertson; Stanford Vice President, Fund-Raiser

Kenneth MacLean Cuthbertson, 81, Stanford University vice president credited with the nation’s two top fund-raising campaigns in higher education. Cuthbertson, a native of San Francisco, spent much of his career at Stanford, where he served as vice president from 1960 until his retirement in 1977. Contributing part of his own salary, he spearheaded higher education’s record-setting fund-raising campaigns in 1961-64, when he collected $114 million under Stanford’s Plan of Action for a Challenging Era, and in 1972-77, when he raised $300 million in the Campaign for Stanford. Former Stanford President Donald Kennedy called Cuthbertson “the founder of modern academic development strategy.” Cuthbertson was an academically outstanding student at Stanford and served as student body president in 1940. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he returned to the university for an MBA and then spent a year studying at Harvard Business School. He worked for a few years as a management consultant with McKinsey & Co. in San Francisco, then returned to Stanford in 1954 as assistant to university President J.E. Wallace Sterling. After his retirement from the university 23 years later, Cuthbertson served as president of the James Irvine Foundation of San Francisco and Irvine. On April 30 in The Sequoias in Portola Valley, of Parkinson’s disease.