The University’s “Inspire Innovation” capital campaign and the role of the Tepper School of Business

To our alumni and friends:

In October 2008 Carnegie Mellon University announced the launch of a capital campaign with the goal of raising $1 billion by the end of 2013. Actually, this announcement marks the beginning of the public phase of the campaign; the University and the Tepper School have been raising funds for the campaign since 2003.

This announcement will naturally prompt a number of questions from the Tepper School’s alumni and friends. Why are we launching this campaign? What role will the Tepper School play in the university campaign and what are the Tepper School’s short- and long-term goals?

Universities use capital campaigns to focus attention – for a very specific period of time – on their most critical financial needs and through such campaigns they secure the funds to meet those needs. Carnegie Mellon and the Tepper School are great, yet undercapitalized, institutions. The fact that the School has succeeded so remarkably is a testimony to our extraordinary culture of collaboration, our energetic engagement with the key evolving issues in economics, business, technology and finance, and our faculty’s sheer hard work and dedication.

However, without an adequate funding base the school’s potential is at risk. We compete – for top faculty and for the best students – with the world’s wealthiest universities and business schools – Stanford, MIT, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania, to name just a few. The essential goal of the capital campaign is to provide the capital we need to sustain our legacy of greatness and attain even higher levels of achievement and recognition in the decades ahead.

Our goals in this campaign have been set organically in light of the Tepper School’s specific needs and priorities. Since 2003, through the generous support of David Tepper and many others, we have raised more than $100 million in new gifts and commitments. We aspire, during the campaign period ending in 2013, to raise an additional $100 million from alumni, friends, corporations and foundations.

Campaign priorities can and often do shift over a five-year period as new needs and opportunities emerge. But our most critical current need is to increase the School’s endowment, and this will be the focus of our campaign. As the graph below indicates, we have made substantial progress toward this goal over the last five years, doubling our endowment.

To compete successfully as a top-tier business school we need to further grow our endowment to a minimum of $200 million by 2013. Dean Ken Dunn has challenged us to achieve the $250 million mark by that time. We especially need endowment gifts to support new professorships and research funds, particularly during a period in which several of our most prominent faculty members are nearing retirement and when the dean will be faced with the task or recruiting new scholars to maintain our leadership position in important fields of research. New endowment funding is also required to support fellowships and financial aid, to ensure that the distinctive and powerful benefits of a Tepper School education remain available to students regardless of their or their families’ financial means and to attract the very most talented and promising students to the Tepper School of Business.

We also seek, through the campaign, to increase both the percentage of alumni making gifts to the annual fund and increasing the support provided to the school through the annual fund. These gifts, too, support critically important objectives: allowing us to enhance the student experience through case competitions and other outside-of-the-classroom activities, to acquire the technology required in the 21st-century business school classroom, to make needed renovations to our facilities, to support the alumni network and alumni activities, to fund marketing initiatives targeted to prospective students and recruiters.

What will the Tepper School look like as a result of a successful capital campaign? We do not aspire to be Harvard Business School or Stanford Business School. We believe that we offer an education that is distinctively different and arguably better than any other business school.

Dean Ken Dunn has articulated a compelling vision of the School’s future: the Tepper School will dominate the space where business and technology intersect. Capitalizing on our legacy strengths and our emerging strengths, we also aim to maintain or to quickly achieve a position of international pre-eminence in several carefully selected areas: operations research and operations management, finance and computational finance, marketing analytics and technology, and behavioral research.

A successful capital campaign will ensure that the most accomplished scholars in these fields will want to be at the Tepper School and will want to stay at the Tepper School throughout their careers.

It will ensure that the very brightest and most promising Undergraduate, Master's and PhD students will see the Tepper School as their top pick among business programs.

It will mean that the top corporate recruiters in these fields will regard the Tepper School as their very best source of talent.

It will maintain and enhance our ability to do what we do better than any other school in the world: providing students with a rigorous, analytically-based framework for solving business problems and achieving professional success.

It will mean achieving broad and well deserved recognition for Tepper as one of the world’s truly great business schools.

In the months and years ahead, the Dean and the school’s Advancement staff will be reaching out to you, through personal visits, through alumni and fundraising events, through publications and e-mails. We invite you to think carefully about the school’s needs, and the role you can play in ensuring this campaign’s success.

We look forward to working with you to ensure a truly great future for our school.