In Manhattan last week President Arlo Ayres Brown of small Drew University at Madison, N. J. (enrollment: 400), launched a campaign to raise $600,000 additional endowment during the next eight months.
In South Hadley, Mass., retiring President Mary Emma Woolley of Mount Holyoke broke ground for a new $250,000 chapel, reported encouraging progress in her current campaign for a $10,000,000 college fund. Same time, President Frederick P. Keppel of Carnegie Corporation observed in his annual report that the in come of private educational institutions had started on the upgrade from Depression.
Heartened by these signs of the times were the elusive members of the profession whose business is institutional money-raising. One of its deans, baldish, square-shouldered George Olver Tamblyn of the Manhattan firm of Tamblyn & Tamblyn, began to bombard the desks of U. S. school executives with a brochure called Now Is the Time. Thesis of Now Is the Time is that schools are not sharing sufficiently in the national recovery, that the time is ripe once more for Alma Mater to put out her hand.
Fund-Raiser Tamblyn points out that since 1932 the U. S. national income has gained 33.9%, while private educational income has dropped 28.5%. Since 1934, educational income has recovered just ½%. To articulate the extent to which Depression has damaged the nation's $3,000,000,000 private educational plant, Mr. Tamblyn quotes from a U. S. Office of Education survey of 588 private secondary schools and colleges. While average expenditures between 1929 and 1935 dropped from $417,983 to $346,572, average total income fell even further, from $476,200 to $297,603. The average U. S. private school and college, in other words, is losing money. That is because, unlike other businesses, private schools can rarely balance their budgets without outside help, and gifts to the average institution in the same period dipped from $156,992 to $29,945. First lesson Fund-Raiser Tamblyn hopes every school executive will derive from Now Is the Time is that if he wants his school to revive he had better start passing the hat. Second lesson is that he had better hire a professional to pass it.
Fund-raising as a business dates from the great money drives of War days. George Olver Tamblyn (Colgate 1903) was membership extension director of the Atlantic Division of the Red Cross when he met John Crosby Brown (Yale 1915), scion of the banking Brown brothers, son of Union Theological Seminary's onetime Professor William Adams Brown who married Anne Spencer Morrow to Charles Augustus Lindbergh. After conducting money drives for the Red Cross in 1920, they formed Tamblyn & Brown, a firm which prosperously endured until two years ago when the partners quarreled. Mr. Brown now runs Tamblyn & Brown and Mr. Tamblyn has launched Tamblyn & Tamblyn with his son, a recent Colgate graduate. The original firm of Tamblyn & Brown planned and executed the raising of $225,000,000 for private & public causes, made fund-raising history by collecting some $20,773,000 for Yale's Alumni Endowment Fund in 1927.