Talk to Wooster
Spring 2005
Green Grows Our Endowment
Wooster’s long-term investments are robust enough to nourish a distinctive academic program. But it wasn ’t always that way.
Email StoryWalking on water
|
"Talent and ability…can only be secured by paying it a liberal compensation," a Wooster trustee wrote in 1868. "Eastern colleges have been so endowed by their patrons that they are able to secure whomsoever they may desire to obtain for the adornment of their society."
To allow Wooster to compete for the best talent, the nineteenth-century board hoped to raise an endowment of $500,000. It took almost fifty years to do it.
Throughout the College’s first century, the endowment grew slowly. The paucity of endowment income was one reason that finances were perennially tight. President Emeritus Henry J. Copeland recalls Dean Hopkins ’30, whose service as a trustee spanned forty years, saying more than once, as the board passed the budget, "Well, we’re going to walk on water one more time."
When Copeland became president in 1977, he and the board agreed that the endowment, then $15 million, needed to grow significantly in order to support and further strengthen Wooster’s academic program. A pair of million dollar gifts that year, from the Timken Foundation of Canton and Foster McGaw, a friend of the College, set the stage for the effort to come.
Most college presidents have dreamed at one time or another about what fundraising professionals call "a transformational gift" – the eight- or nine-figure donation that can alter the life of an institution almost overnight. But an endowment is not built on dreams.
"Bill Pocock talked a lot about ‘blocking and tackling,’" Copeland says. "He said there was no secret to growing the endowment, it was a matter of execution. You did it $50,000 at a time."
Copeland credits Pocock ’38, board chairman from 1970 to 1987, with putting in place the disciplines necessary to achieve real growth. In the 1970s, undesignated bequests had often been used simply to balance the operating budget. Now the College began to funnel those gifts into the endowment. The board set minimum donations for establishing named scholarships and chairs and plowed investment proceeds back into some older funds that had ceased to generate enough income to support their original purpose. The spending rate – the amount drawn out of the endowment each year to fund college operations – was reduced from seven to six percent by the mid-1990s.
Pocock did more than establish policies. "Nothing delighted him more than to go off to the hinterlands of western Pennsylvania and find someone who had not been visited in fifty years and come back with a $50,000 annuity," Copeland says. "He acted as an unpaid member of the staff."
Pocock’s successor as board chairman, Stanley Gault ’48, chaired Wooster’s fundraising campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s, which added almost $40 million to the endowment.
"Stan Gault is just remarkable for his dedication and his willingness to use his time for Wooster," Copeland says. "During those campaigns, it seemed like he did his day job in the morning and worked for Wooster in the afternoon."
Fundraising success was one part of the equation for endowment growth. Return on investment was the other.
For years, Wooster’s endowment was managed in-house, with oversight from an ad hoc group of local trustees "who met once a week down at the drugstore and talked over what was happening in the markets," said emeritus trustee George Ingram Jr.
As finance committee chairman in the early 1970s, Ingram created and chaired the board’s first investment subcommittee. He recruited people like Henry Luce III, Rob Walton ’66, Jim Wilson ’63 and Stan Gault as members. The committee wrote formal asset allocation guidelines, hired outside investment managers for the first time, and monitored their performance closely.
Ingram also recruited one other key player for the committee.
"The first day Henry [Copeland] was on the job," Ingram recalls, "I came in and said, ‘I want you to be on the investment committee.’ He said, ‘I don’t know anything about investments.’ And I told him that’s why I want you on the committee. You’re going to be going around the country, talking to alumni about contributing. You need to be able to tell them what we’re doing with their money."
Over the next eighteen years, the president, trustees, and development staff worked to identify specific ways in which new endowed resources could help strengthen the College’s academic program. And they doggedly pursued them. By the time Copeland retired in 1995, eleven new endowed professorships had been established. Millions had been raised for scholarships. New sources of "intellectual venture capital" like The Henry Luce III Fund for Distinguished Scholarship and the Hewlett-Mellon Presidential Discretionary Fund for Institutional Renewal had been endowed. And the market value of Wooster’s endowment had grown almost sevenfold, to $116 million.
