Matthew Miller

mrmiller@lsj.com

MSU plans to launch the public phase of a $1.5 billion capital campaign on Oct. 24

This will be the second major fund-raising campaign in MSU’s history. The first, called The Campaign for MSU, raised more than $1.2 billion.

The quiet phase of the current campaign began in the summer of 2011 and has already raised more than $700 million

EAST LANSING – Since last month, Michigan State University’s development office has been mailing out glossy green-and-white cards in the shape of Beaumont Tower.

They tell their recipients to “plan now to join special friends of MSU for something extraordinary” on Oct. 24 — the day before the Spartans play the University of Michigan at Spartan Stadium. The cards don’t say it, but that “something” is the launch of the public phase of a $1.5 billion fundraising campaign.

The quiet phase of the campaign has been going on since mid-2011. It already has brought in more than $700 million.

“We had a record year last year,” said Bob Groves, MSU’s vice president for university advancement “We added $239 million to the total and that’s a high-water mark for the university in terms of private fundraising.”

The goal of raising $1.5 billion by 2018 is a modest one in the context of fundraising efforts at other Big Ten schools.

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 two years ago. Penn State announced this past spring that it had cleared its $2 billion campaign goal early, and that was despite a child sex scandal.

“You would always like that number to be as large as possible,” said Groves, who was recruited away from U-M six years ago after overseeing a $3.1 billion campaign there.

The $1.5 billion figure was arrived at after conversations with major donors, he said. Just 1 percent of the donors accounted for 83 percent of the money MSU raised during its last campaign.

And, it’s an acknowledgment that roughly half of MSU’s 500,000 alumni live in Michigan and many still are recovering from a recession that hit harder and lasted longer here than in many other parts of the country.

The idea is to build the campaign around a handful of needs and wants — scholarships for needy students, new buildings, money to pursue the sort of research projects that could have global impact.

For Sanjay Gupta, acting dean of the Broad College of Business, the central focus of the coming campaign will be raising money for a 100,000-square-foot “graduate pavilion” that will replace the west wing of the Eppley Building. With advanced digital classrooms, laboratories, meeting rooms and so called “data caves,” the estimated cost is close to $50 million.

“That will be a large chunk of it but we’ve got other areas of focus apart from that,” he said. Attracting and retaining good faculty, for instance, is one of the college’s biggest challenges.

And one of the university’s. For more than a year, MSU’s leaders have been talking publicly about the need to increase the number of endowed chairs. The average Big Ten school has more than 300 of them, Groves said. MSU has closer to 100.

The university also envisions using some of the money, perhaps as much as $250 million, to provide some of the flexibility that has been lost after years of dwindling state support.

“I like to say, ‘If this was 50 years ago and we had the opportunity to invest in what is now the cyclotron, which became our core for FRIB, would we have had the money to invest?’ ” Groves said. “There’s a lot of things we have to take a pass on if we don’t have the funds.”

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. Despite losses during the recession years, MSU’s endowment topped $2 billion in 2013.

The launch of the campaign also could be read as an indication that MSU President Lou Anna Simon plans to stay on in her position for a while.

She is 67 years old. She has allowed that her retirement probably is not too far off. And she has acknowledged the substantial bonuses she’s received the last two years have come because the Board of Trustees is trying to bring her compensation in line with other presidents as preparation for her eventual successor. At the same time, it’s unusual for a president to leave in the middle of a capital campaign.

“You lose momentum when there’s a shift in the presidency,” said Rita Bornstein, president emerita and professor of philanthropy and leadership development at Rollins College, “because a lot of giving to universities and colleges has to do with belief in the president’s vision.”

“When there’s a shift,” she said, “it interrupts that process.”