Ripon College Days

Three major recent donations have created a well of capital for the college, bolstering its financial outlook that had struggled through most of the 1990's.

The gifts, which total $3.5 million, will bolster academic departments, partially restore faculty benefits and allow the college to break ground on a number of renovation projects.

For the second time in less than a year, the college will name an endowed professorship, the first such position created in more than a dozen years.

A $2 million gift from deceased alumnus Harrison Farnsworth will create a new position in the physics department, President David Joyce announced last week. The news comes seven months after the creation of the McCullough Professorship in Biology.

Farnsworth's gift will support the hire of a second faculty member in the physics department, a position cut in May 2002.

Farnsworth, who graduated from Ripon in 1918 with a degree in physics, became one of the nation's foremost atomic physicists and did pioneering work in substances now widely used in nanotechnology.

The gift also puts the college in position to restore the major in physics, a decision that would take a faculty vote for approval.

President Joyce says he expects a search process for the new faculty member to begin this fall and the position to be filled by the start of the 2006 fall semester.

He also says some faculty committees have begun discussing restoration of the major, but he calls the current state of those discussions "preliminary."

Farnsworth's gift is among several announced last week that, bit by bit, are moving the college away toward a firmer financial grounding.

A $1 million gift from an anonymous donor will fund a slight increase in faculty pensions.

"It will be roughly equivalent to a pre-tax raise of just under one percent," Joyce says.

The pensions, which had been a contribution of eight percent of a faculty member's salary to a retirement account, were

eliminated in July 2002 to balance the college budget.

The pensions were partially restored in 2003 by an anonymous gift that contributed three percent of each faculty member's salary to their retirement account, but that gift will be depleted by June 30, 2005.

Once fully funded, this gift will permanently endow an extra one percent contribution to those retirement accounts.

A third gift of more than $400,000 will provide an endowment for Communicating Plus as well as fund the construction of the new bookstore location in the commons.

"This gift is a tremendous opportunity for Communicating Plus," says Deano Pape, director of Communicating Plus and assistant professor of communication. "This will help free up the college's

limited resources to help other departments."

These three recent gifts, plus many smaller gifts and controlled spending, are helping the college toward a larger endowment.

Joyce says the college will add at least $3.5 million to its endowment this fiscal year, far more than was added last year.

These contributions would bring the endowment to roughly $41 million, about $10 million more than when Joyce became president.

"I really believe we're creating some momentum," Joyce says. "For a donor to give a significant gift like these, it means they have confidence in the college... they believe in what the college stands for."

He says that the increase in giving as well as a projected third consecutive year of balanced budgets put the college on much firmer financial footing than it has held in the recent past.

But while the college may be making progress, Joyce says there is significant work still ahead.

Adressing faculty and staff last week, Joyce reaffirmed a commitment to reach an endowment of $100 million, a goal he announced when he came to Ripon in 2003.

"The colleges that will continue to succeed in the future will be those heavily endowed. That's my personal philosophy," Joyce says.

A larger endowment would lower the college's dependence on tuition, bringing it from its current 75 percent of total revenue to nearer the ACM average of 55 percent.

To that end the college is beginning to plan a forthcoming capital campaign to significantly bolster the endowment.

While details on the upcoming campaign are not yet set, the college seems to be planning to launch the campaign in the next two years.

"We want to start thinking about doing a campaign," Joyce says.

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