ANU's Vice-Chancellor Seeks a Modest Midas Touch. (September 24, 2011)

With the retirement of Ian Chubb last March Ian Young took up the vice-chancellorship of the Australian National University and now just on 6-months later he has unveiled his 10-year plan to insulate the university from the whims of governmental funding which continues to move inexorably downward relative to costs.

Watching Oxford and Cambridge following on US universities, both public as well as private, professor Young intends to hit the ANU alumni and to that end he has increased the budget for alumni development and outreach from the current million dollars per annum to over than $3million with the intention of quadrupling alumni donors to 4% of the cohort by the end of the next decade.

Compared to the US top private universities that's a very modest goal. For example, back in July 1994 Stanford University undertook a survey to better understand why only 25% of Stanford's undergraduate degree holders, on average, made annual gifts to the university, compared to more than 50% for Harvard. That participation rate had remained about the same ever since Stanford began to keep track following the end of WWII.

However, despite the GFC Stanford in recent times is not doing too badly in finding the US$3.8 billion per annum to keep the enterprise solvent:

Professor Young also has modest ambitions for increasing ANU's endowment currently $179 million to $334million before the end of the decade. Cambridge's endowment is currently is £6.7 billion including the colleges, Oxford University is about half that at £3.3 billion also including the colleges.

The Canberra Times reports that: "By 2015, the ANU will need to secure gifts from trust, foundation and corporate donors worth at least $9million a year, rising to $12million a year by 2020. By 2020 the ANU will also need to secure at least two 'transformative gifts' of more than $10million each." and Professor Yong went on to say: "The next 10 years is going to be quite challenging for all Australian universities in terms of quite tight government funding - regardless of who is in power - uncertain global economic conditions, and the international student market bottoming out."

And while the ANU vice-chancellor sees his charge as "small" in fact it has about the same student body as Cambridge and Oxford.

If Professor Young really intends to have ANU become competitive with the staff's research contributions to be comparable to those of Cambridge and Oxford, he's got one hell of a job before him.