December 22, 2003, 12:01 a.m.
Alma Mater Alternatives
Giving — the best way.

By William C. Dennis

The holiday season stimulates charity in many of us. This sentiment, combined with the necessity of making final decisions for the current tax year, produces a spate of year-end giving. As a result, we now find our mailboxes crowded with year-end appeals from groups hoping to gain a share of our forthcoming largesse.

Among these appeals will surely be one from your college alumni association; I got mine just the other day. Perhaps right now you are wondering whether you should cut the college another check on top of the already generous donations you have made over the years. After all, you had a terrific time there as an undergraduate. You worked hard and played hard in college, and got the foundation for a professional life that has taken you far. There you met your soul mate for life. You still follow the football team and go to class reunions. And you are flattered by all the invitations from the college president — to serve on advisory councils for this and that, and to take the alumni cruise to the Greek islands. Why, you even have fond memories of several old professors, long gone from the scene, who tried to lead you through the intricacies of the Federalist Papers, Shakespeare, Aristotle, and Edward Gibbon. Now the college has come to you, once again, asking for a contribution to the annual fund or a major capital campaign. And once again the college seems, despite years of successful fundraising, ever more desperate for additional support, from their ever-patient alumni.

Still, you have some doubts. After all, you know money is fungible, and the college does seem to be spending its resources on some strange projects these days. For instance, just recently, the college granted honorary degrees to various figures seemingly hostile to American liberty. And if you make that requested contribution to the new weight room in the multi-million dollar gym, will that free up funds for the endowment of a professorship in Marxist Feminist Studies, or for support for the anti-American poet in residence? The current faculty does not appear to contain many you would care to study with, and is full of lefty-crazies and smug political correctness, with few (if any) prominent defenders of the free society in its ranks. Where, you may have asked yourself, is there a historian, an economist, or a political theorist who has some appreciation for the great achievements of Western civilization, and who believes that America, on balance, has been a force for the good in our own time? Now that your children are thinking about college themselves, do you really want your daughter living in that expensive new housing complex featuring co-ed bathrooms? Maybe you have told yourself that this is the year to forgo that contribution to Old Ivy and take another, closer, look at the college before you invest any more of your hard-earned money there.

And look you should. Colleges want your money, but they don't want your advice. As a recent article in National Review by John J. Miller about donors' troubles at Princeton makes clear, all too often colleges have trouble keeping solemn promises made to their loyal donors. Donors interested in the defense and enhancement of the institutions of liberty are rightly worried that the great traditions of the Western world receive short shrift at too many of our institutions of higher learning. News comes almost daily of new academic attacks on liberty and the free expression of conservative views at leading American colleges and universities. In the current climate of political correctness, thoughtful donors may well conclude that they should withhold funds from their alma maters altogether. Indeed, for friends of liberty, contributions to a college's general fund are probably, more often than not, counterproductive. Even donations for specific projects such as a lecture series on liberty, or an endowed chair of free enterprise, are not safe. Not only can such a contribution simply free up funds to be spent elsewhere on academic nonsense: What's worse, even well-thought-out programs usually go astray over time through cooption by the opponents of liberty, or through neglect by college administrators.

Do not despair, however. There is a neat way to support your alma mater without financing activities and people you oppose. The way to do this is to keep control of your money yourself and out of the hands of the college administration. Of course, the administrators will protest. They will insist, rightly I believe, that a private party cannot operate an independent project on a college campus. They will say, wrongly I am sure, that they have the expertise and knowledge, and you really should let them have the money without restrictions. They will worry, perhaps not aloud, that your independent action will encourage others and erode the effectiveness of their annual fund drive. (One can only hope.) But the administrators nevertheless will find it hard to thwart your end run around their control of your donations — if you act carefully.

Here is what to do. Set up a donors-advised fund at a charitable gift fund. All the big investment houses run one. Even better, use DonorsTrust, Inc., a fund established expressly to receive and disburse money through donors-advised funds directed toward projects supporting the institutions of a free society. Donors-advised funds work a bit like a mini-private foundation or a charitable bank account. Donors create a special sub-fund within the charitable-gift fund umbrella. Then the donor makes an irrevocable gift of money or appreciated securities into the sub-fund, which will be eligible for a tax deduction, just as a direct contribution to a college would be. The fund may have only one donor, or it can be a family fund, or a fund formed by a group of concerned alumni to receive money from several different sources. Each donors-advised fund has its own mission statement and advisors, so donors can state clearly what types of projects are eligible for the fund's philanthropy.

Donors-advised funds are highly flexible charitable instruments. They can be established with modest funds and added to over time. They are well within the means of millions of Americans. Normally you need only a few thousand dollars to open a fund, so a concerned donor should not hesitate to get one started. Once established, the fund managers will disburse the money with the advice of the donors (subject to a few constraints), to projects of the donors' choosing at nonprofit organizations.

Now you need only one more thing — on-campus sponsors, either students or faculty, preferably both, who are sympathetic to the purposes of the fund. Such persons may be difficult to find on some campuses, but all you need is one. The administration is not going to like this fund, and will fear that others may be created, and will suggest that you direct the fund's grants to their own projects. But you must resist these blandishments. Instead disburse the money through your charitable gift fund, using other tax-exempt groups as intermediaries, to student and faculty projects of your own choosing. Since you have at least one member of the university community already on your side and eager to help out, the administration will have a hard time opposing your actions without calling into question its devotion to academic freedom, the most sacred ideal of the modern university community. Your on-campus agent will need some nerve to withstand campus opposition — so choose carefully — but with such help it will be difficult for the administration to oppose your expenditures.

Once your fund is in business, your contributions to the university are limited only by your resources and your imagination. Here are a few possibilities you might develop, listed roughly according to their cost from less to more:

Sponsor a lecture by an off-campus friend of liberty.
Subsidize the operations of a campus discussion group or a student alternative newspaper.
Help students and faculty travel to national and international meetings devoted to scholarship related to human liberty.
Pay for a student or faculty internship at some public-policy think tank or free-standing research institution.
Support faculty summer research on a project related to the ideals of a free society.
Sponsor a visiting professorship for a leading scholar of liberty at your alma mater.
Support an entire professorship for a scholar of your choosing at your institution. (This is tricky, but possible.)

Establishing such a fund need not create an adversarial relationship with your college or university. You may find ways to work together on particular projects, though you do need to be careful to not just replace funds that the college was willing to contribute to a worthwhile project with money of your own.

Better still, you need not be alone in this endeavor. There are wonderful groups available to consult with donors on their university giving, for example, DonorsTrust, the Philanthropy Roundtable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the National Association of Scholars, and the American Academy for Liberal Education. Others work to provide academic support directly to students and faculty. Some examples: the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and the Fund for American Studies. Then there is a large array of conservative and libertarian public-policy think tanks, too numerous to list here, most of which have regular programs for visiting scholars and student summer interns, programs that need regular support if they are to thrive and expand.

Is such a project really doable? Of course it is. Several of the groups listed above can provide examples of successful endeavors along these lines. Indeed, in a small way I have established such a fund myself. With a handful of foresightful donors, I have created a fund at my alma mater, sufficiently large to support an outside lecturer each year. But we have just begun. Friends of liberty have done a lot of grumbling about the state of the academy: Now is the time to take positive action to improve the situation. Conservatives need to take their university giving seriously, and not just agree to support whatever projects college authorities suggest. Instead, conservatives should deploy their philanthropic resources carefully and effectively on their own endeavors. Your alma mater does need help, but not in the ways the college administration wants you to believe.

Go for it. Get some advice and help. Be of stout heart. This can be a revolution without tarrying. But, take note: You probably won't be invited to that dinner at the president's house any time soon.

— William C. Dennis, a former college professor and foundation officer, is a consultant on philanthropic giving in McLean, Virginia.