JOHN W. BOYER
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campaign. Those funds have been hard won, but they will help both faculty and students alike in the years to come. We have three years to complete our part of the campaign. We face a huge amount of work in the months ahead, but I am pleased with the energy with which we are proceeding. The current campaign will have a significant impact on the future financial well-being of the College and the University. How are campaigns organized? Why are they so important? How difficult is it to raise funds for the University? These are timely and legitimate questions, and they take us back into our history and reveal some fascinating aspects of our past. Fund-raising campaigns require that universities encounter and engage wide sectors of American society. Universities and especially this particular university usually think of themselves as institutions of permanence that operate apart from the bustle of the world, changing slowly and only according to their own desires and wishes. Yet fund raising brings them in touch with contemporary American life and forces them to step out of their isolation to appeal for support from an array of human and corporate actors—some of whom are alumni, while others are essentially strangers. How are universities affected by this intermingling? How do they explain what they are and why they deserve support? Who supports them? Are they tempted to change what they are in the constant search for funds? Financing and organizing a university in 2004 is a different enterprise from organizing and financing one in 1904. For example, like many of our sister institutions, the University of Chicago today is much more dependent on tuition revenue and on fund raising than it was in 1900 or 1925. Today, universities must raise funds constantly and with considerable urgency, just as all other successful not-for-profit institutions do in the United States.
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