Matthew Miller

mrmiller@lsj.com

EAST LANSING – After the Michigan State University Symphony Orchestra had finished playing and the video filled with iconic images of the campus had run to the end, Lou Anna Simon took the stage in the Wharton Center's Cobb Great Hall.

"I want to do my official piece as the president of Michigan State University to announce the campaign, which you all know about," she said. The audience, made up largely of donors to the university, chuckled. "It was the next best kept secret outside of Superman at the Broad."

The university launched the public phase of a $1.5 billion capital campaign on Friday, Empower Extraordinary: The Campaign for Michigan State University. It will focus on scholarships for needy students, money new buildings, funding for the sort of research that could have global impact, 100 new endowed faculty chairs.

A parade of students, faculty, deans and donors explained those goals over the course of two hours Friday night. Basketball coach Tom Izzo, eschewing the teleprompter, talked about "the incredible ability to give something to someone and then watch them grow." The challenge from Eli Broad was announced closer to the end.

The billionaire MSU alumnus, who gave $20 million in 1991 to what is now the Broad College of Business and another $33 million to found and maintain the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, was offering another $25 million, but other donors would have to more than match it.

"We hope that our challenge will inspire others to help us provide the business college with the financial resources necessary to recruit the best faculty, award scholarships to needy students and create the collaborative spaces that a world class business school needs," Broad said, in a statement read by Sanjay Gupta, acting dean of the College of Business.

The idea is to leverage that money to bring in another $80 million. The Broads have promised to donate $1 for every $5 given to support the construction of a 100,000-square-foot "graduate pavilion" that will replace the west wing of the Eppley Building, up to $10 million.

They have also pledged to give $1 for every $2 given to support programmatic initiatives, a talent fund and scholarships for students, up to $15 million.

"This is going to have a tremendous impact throughout the Broad college in a way that is going to be remarkable, in a way that we have never done it before and in a way that is going to bring a tremendous reputational advantage," Gupta said.

MSU is starting the public portion of the campaign more than halfway to its goal. The quiet phase, focused on major donors rather than the general public, began in summer 2011. Including Broad's donation, it brought in $780 million.

It has been "very successful," said Bob Skandalaris, a 1974 alumnus, chairman and CEO of Quantum Ventures of Michigan and a co-chair of the Campaign Cabinet. He and his wife, Julie, plan to give $10 million to the university for athletic programs, the largest donation ever to athletics.

The public campaign, which began officially Friday morning with a vote from the university's Board of Trustees, will run through 2018. Skandalaris said he has few doubts about MSU's ability to hit the $1.5 billion goal.

"There's still a lot of large donors out there," he said, "and Michigan State has just about 500,000 alumni."

The goal is, if anything, modest. U-M launched the public phase of a $4 billion campaign last year. The University of Illinois raised more than $2.4 billion in a campaign that concluded in 2012. Penn State announced in spring that it had cleared its $2 billion campaign goal early, and that was despite a child sex scandal.

But it's worth noting that each of those schools has a medical center, typically a huge boon in fundraising. MSU doesn't.

Simon said the more modest goal is also a reflection of the fact that roughly half of MSU's alumni live in Michigan and Michigan hasn't recovered from the recession and the downturn that preceded it as quickly as other parts of the country.

MSU came late to the fundraising game. In 1999, when the university launched the quiet phase of what would be known as The Campaign for MSU, its endowment stood at $595 million, last in the Big Ten.

By 2006, the Campaign for MSU had raised more than $1.2 billion, though Simon said that it might be better to think of it as a $1 billion campaign. The value of some donations, software or patents, for instance, would be calculated differently now, she said.

Despite losses during the recession years, MSU's endowment topped $2 billion in 2013, a figure that includes more than $300 million held by the MSU Foundation.

And MSU has learned a few things from that first campaign, among them the benefits of decentralization.

Each of the university's 17 colleges, along with other units such as libraries, athletics and the art museum, are running their own campaigns with their own goals and advisory committees. MSU has also brought together regional advisory committees to help the university connect with donors in other parts of the country.

"It's much more sophisticated. It's much more data based. It's much better organized," said university President Lou Anna Simon. "But it's also organized to sustain itself after the end of the campaign."

The future, she said, "will always be in campaign mode of some form."

On the web:

empower.msu.edu