Last week, we ran an article on how donors, potential donors, trustees and development staff have been responding to each other about the Silent Sam controversy. This article provided new insight into a situation of concern beyond Silent Sam: the role of donors in influencing the University administration.
UNC Chapel Hill's budget is quite dependent on private giving. Students will find this out once the General Alumni Association starts calling them to secure some form of giving, possibly even before they graduate. The role of donors and development staff is constant, but most often relatively hidden until a gift is agreed upon and announced.
Yet the role of donors and development staff, given their importance, should be the subject of more attention than they currently receive. Their communication is considered public record and can be requested through the Freedom of Information Act.
Anti-elitists reflexively balk at the idea of donors getting more say than the students, faculty or workers as to how UNC should run and what it should build. Development staff are often derided as shameless mercenaries ready to sell out any community principle for a gift and commission. These attitudes cheat those members of our community out of the recognition they deserve.
The UNC we know and love would not be possible without donor gifts unless tuition and/or taxes were raised, always politically difficult propositions. Development staff are among the finest persuaders in our midst, trying to balance donor vanity and concerns, but ultimately potential generosity with the actual needs and wants our University.
Donors often attach conditions to gifts. These can be quite legally specific project parameters, such as for a particular building or faculty chair. Or a gift's conditions can be as petty as getting rid of an assistant coach or professor that unintentionally snubbed the donor. The Daily Tar Heel has had success in requesting donor communications — most recently with the messages sent in the aftermath of Silent Sam's toppling.
As a community, we should strive to learn how much of our material reality at UNC is fostered by donors and development, and what the conditions of that fostering are. We can then as a community weigh, if not purely democratically then at least discursively, whether the offered donation is worth its conditions.
