University Fund Raisers in Europe Appear Less Shaken by Downturn

University fund raisers’ views on the global economic crisis appear to be split by the Atlantic Ocean.

“There’s difficulty among my European colleagues in understanding the angst in the United States,” said John Lippincott, president of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, speaking here at CASE Europe’s annual meeting, which ended on Thursday.

The meeting drew 839 attendees from 31 countries, down about 70 attendees from last year. Attendance held up much stronger than it did at recent meetings of the association in the United States, Mr. Lippincott said.

University fund raisers in the United States, including many at prominent institutions like Cornell and Stanford Universities and the University of Washington, are reeling from the effects of a bad year in which gifts and endowments were down and many of their colleagues were laid off. But British and continental fund raisers appear less shaken.

John J. Glier, president of Grenzebach Glier and Associates, an international fund-raising consulting firm, said that among his British clients, fund-raising income was flat or slightly up from last year.

In the United States, Mr. Glier said, the recession has led to the postponement and cancellations of many capital campaigns. “The pipeline to major gifts is smaller than it’s ever been,” said Mr. Glier, who led a session at the meeting on the impact of the economy on fund raisers and allied professionals.

CASE’s own survey of fund raisers across higher education in North America found that in the year ending June 30, they expected their gifts to be down 4 percent. In the year ahead, the survey found, fund raisers expect growth of 2.5 percent. That is against a backdrop of an average of 7 percent annual growth over the last 20 years. (Similar figures are not available for Europe, where higher-education fund raising is much less common.)

Several European institutions are seizing strategic opportunities in the midst of the crisis. Maria Puig, executive director of the Global Executive M.B.A. program at IESE Business School, at the University of Navarra, in Spain, said that her institution had purchased a $28-million building in New York, where the school will run short-term academic programs and conduct research on how international companies can enter the American market.

In Scotland, the University of Aberdeen is also planning to use the economic downturn to its advantage. “This recession, for British universities at least, is a time of staggering opportunities,” said Sir Duncan Rice, the university’s vice chancellor. Sir Duncan, who is also the chairman of CASE Europe’s board of trustees, said his own university had recently set aside £15-million, or about $24.4-million, for recruiting new professors. The university, he said, would try to get the best talent it could in whatever disciplines it could find the best scholars. Aberdeen is a center of the North Sea oil industry, and its economy is doing better than the economies of some other British cities.

While many potential donors to higher education have lost money in the recession, Sir Duncan noted that the dominant British stock index, the FTSE 100, has gone up sharply in recent months. Those savvy investors who brought stocks at the bottom will make a lot of money on the upswing, he said.

Other observers at the meeting cautioned that not all British universities are faring as well as Aberdeen. Many British universities are heavily dependent on the government for support and could yet face some serious economic harm in the recession’s wake. British universities, like American community colleges, are flooded with applicants, some of them taking shelter from the recession or seeking new skills.

David L. Wheeler is managing editor for international affairs at The Chronicle of Higher Education.