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UNLV officials had a problem.
Their school had long been dissed as an academic institution, mocked as Tumbleweed Tech or Basketball U., a place to get a middling education for not much money.
Las Vegas loved the university's basketball team. Fans poured money into the athletic program and UNLV responded with a national championship. Nevadans, however, didn't show much interest in the academic side.
But that was only part of the problem.
Three years ago, one of Nevada's leading figures - businessman Jim Rogers - decided the time had come to move UNLV forward academically. Rogers, who has gotten rich owning television stations, had already pledged $28.9 million to the UNLV Boyd School of Law. Now he was offering another $25 million to seed a major fundraising drive.
"If you want to play in the big leagues," Rogers told UNLV officials in March 2003, "you better have big-league goals." He challenged the university and the community to raise $500 million over seven years - short of what top-flight universities go after but still 10 times more than what UNLV had ever tried to raise.
Pushed by Rogers, then-President Carol Harter and trustees of the UNLV Foundation - the university's fundraising arm - committed themselves within weeks to launch the campaign.
But the Foundation was a small operation that didn't have the staff, the resources or the expertise Rogers was used to dealing with as a major donor to universities across the West.
That was part of the problem, too. Outside advisers warned that the Foundation couldn't handle a $500 million drive.
To build momentum, Harter and Foundation officials predated the start of the campaign to January 2002 in order to get credit for donations already in hand. And for the next two years, they quietly shook trees to raise as much as possible before publicly announcing the ambitious drive.
That day came in September 2005, when the campaign finally went public with the promise that it would "Invent the Future" of UNLV.
Now, UNLV had its problem.
Today, more than halfway into the drive, the Foundation is trying to mask its struggle. Fundraising is behind schedule, with little news of the campaign or its effect on the university. There is no crowing on its Web site identifying top-drawer donors. The Foundation reports that it has raised $334 million in cash or pledges, but that number is substantially inflated, according to a review by the Sun.
For instance, more than 40 percent of the money should not be counted, according to national accounting guidelines, because it includes bequests that will arrive only after the patrons die. And in boasting the $141 million in hand, the Foundation credited not only all donations back to Jan. 1, 2002 - long before the campaign was begun - but Rogers' $28.9 million pledge that landed in 1998.
When the fundraising results are reduced to the simplest terms, UNLV is raising $30 million to $40 million a year in cash for the university, about $10 million more annually than before the campaign. But because of the pressure to reach the $500 million goal by the end of 2008 - UNLV's 50th anniversary - the foundation is suggesting far greater success, and using misleading figures, according to nine former and current employees.
Among those applying pressure is Rogers, who has become chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education and now has direct authority over UNLV. Harter is no longer the university's president, but she stands to earn a $250,000 bonus if the $500 million is achieved. And the head of the Foundation already has been rewarded for the fundraising by being named a UNLV vice president.
To be sure, the campaign is reaping dividends that will help long into the future. But the inflated numbers come at a cost.
In the long run, the Foundation is building false expectations, as UNLV professors and students begin to wonder how all those donations are helping improve the university.
In the short term, prospective donors say they are hesitant to pony up as much as they could because they don't see their wealthy peers walking up to the plate.
In the view of current and former Foundation workers, UNLV is trying to shed its unpolished image with a campaign that is still a little too Tumbleweed Tech.
"You can't go from zero to 60 in nothing flat," one former fundraiser who left UNLV mid-campaign said. "You can't go from $1,000 gifts to $100,000 gifts in no time."
From the start, $500 million was a tall order in Las Vegas, a city awash in cash but, until recently, strangely uncharitable.
The transient population is one reason. Building a climate of charitable giving is difficult when U-Haul's phone number is on speed dial all over town. It also doesn't help that money for the collection plate often has to walk past the blackjack table.
There is plenty of old money in town. Forbes magazine identifies four billionaires among our neighbors: Sheldon Adelson, Pierre Omidyar, Bill Boyd and Steve Wynn. And other billionaires have benefited from Las Vegas: Kirk Kerkorian, Carl Icahn, Phil Ruffin and Ed Roski.
But many of the city's wealthiest citizens represent new money, entrepreneurs who have made their fortunes in gaming and growth but lack the liquid assets - and civic commitment - to give seven-figure cash donations.
Established in 1981, the UNLV Foundation reflected its town's lack of sophistication about philanthropy. It relied heavily on yearly, loosely organized fundraising drives through the late 1990s, partly so the president would have discretionary funds to disburse. Foundation executive director John Gallagher was hired in 1995, and two years later UNLV began to explore the possibility of conducting a major, multiyear campaign.
Gallagher came to UNLV with two campaigns under his belt, the largest a $55 million campaign for the University of Puget Sound, a small private school in Tacoma, Wash.
Outside consultants brought in to analyze the structure of the Foundation's staff concluded that it lacked the organization necessary for raising big money, such as departments to target major givers, alumni or estate planning, or to raise money for individual colleges.
The Foundation also was hobbled by haphazard follow-up with donors, abysmal record keeping, poor research on prospective donors and no policy on how to name facilities after benefactors, the consultants said.
Even as UNLV worked to solve some of those problems, including promoting Gallagher to vice president of development to improve his exposure in town, charitable giving had chilled in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Unable to regularly cultivate large gifts, the Foundation focused on "low-hanging fruit," current and former fundraisers say.
UNLV thought it would test the waters again in 2003 with a $250 million or $350 million campaign. But consultants raised many of their earlier concerns and urged caution.
However, Rogers and Foundation trustees refused to lower their sights. The campaign would go forward - with a $500 million goal.
Gallagher said it felt like the Foundation was stepping off a cliff.
"Was there some angst? You bet there was," Gallagher said in a recent interview. "Is there some angst? You bet there is."
And for good reason. Few things can undermine a university's credibility and reputation quicker than announcing a major fundraising effort - and falling short. It telegraphs a lack of community support, and causes donors to wonder whether there are more worthwhile places to give. Usually, in fact, campaign goals are set with expectations to exceed them, in order to inspire confidence in the university.
At UNLV, the bulk of the fundraising responsibility fell on Gallagher. With a Ph.D. in political science and a tendency to wear plaid, Gallagher, a Montana native with startlingly blue eyes, was called by colleagues an "intellectual lumberjack." Coworkers say Gallagher lacks the charisma to energize a fundraising staff, but as a manager he is calm, pleasant, even charming - in a bland sort of way.
Since 2000 Gallagher has been trying to improve the Foundation's fundraising efforts. But the office has only about 40 workers - far fewer than other large universities in the West - and most of the development officers who do the actual arm-twisting have less than two years' experience in promoting the colleges to which they are assigned. It usually takes that long just to warm up donors to the idea of giving big.
While the campaign's mission is to help finance UNLV's growth as a research university, personal careers are at stake, too. President Harter leveraged the fundraising campaign to extend her own contract, telling regents in 2003 that it would stall or hurt the campaign to have a change of leadership. Ten months later, she received a $90,000 salary supplement from Foundation trustees. Gallagher's salary over the years has increased from $95,000 in 1995 to more than $200,000 today.
Thus, UNLV was not the only one that had a lot at stake when, in 2005, during Harter's state-of-the-university address, UNLV officials launched the campaign with the claim of already having raised $98.8 million in cash and $164.2 million in pledges toward the $500 million goal.
The total included a $25 million pledge from gaming executive Bill Boyd, Rogers' two pledges, and a $25 million pledge from the Greenspun family, owners of the Las Vegas Sun, to build a Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. The university also had signed a deal with a private orthodontics company that would net $40 million for the university over 30 years.
But the Foundation was fudging on how it was counting the money given or pledged when the campaign started, using inconsistent accounting methods that the fundraising industry has recognized as problematic and generally tries to avoid.
To foster consistency and accountability in how fundraising is measured, the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, an advisory organization whose fundraising standards are widely adopted by universities, fine-tuned those reporting guidelines in 2003.
Among its recommendations: Revocable bequests should not be counted until after the donor's death because the donors can renege; the value of irrevocable bequests should be discounted because of the uncertainty of their value years down the road; pledges should be paid within five years of being made, and pledges should be counted only if they are made during the actual life of the campaign - usually a seven-year period.
Whether a university adopts the CASE standards or sets its own guidelines, it needs to clearly show how and when the money is coming in, where it is going and how it is going to help, said Mike Mattsson, senior development consultant and former vice president for development at Utah State University. Donors demand transparency and accountability, and if they don't see it, they'll stop giving, Mattsson said.
The UNLV Foundation has strayed from the CASE guidelines, as well as from the ones issued by its own Board of Regents.
Gallagher, Harter, Rogers and Foundation trustees defend the accounting, saying that fundraising is an art that involves squishy numbers.
Gallagher acknowledges that the Foundation is not in line with regents' and CASE guidelines. The reason, he said, is that donors need to be kept happy by being credited for every dollar no matter when or how it is delivered.
"At the end of the day, (donations) are not about counting, they are not about credit. They are about trying to do some good for the institutions," Gallagher said.
Still, there is motivation for the numbers to look good. High-dollar donations build credibility for a university and can spur still more giving in a competitive, civic spirit.
But there are risks, too - especially given the competition among universities to shine in fundraising circles and the temptation to overstate the results of fundraising campaigns.
"There is this arm s race thing that is occurring where we need to beat the Joneses," says John Taylor, a development consultant and co-author of the CASE guidelines. "If we don't start reining ourselves in we'll wake up one morning and read the front page of our newspaper and hear about Enron university" with overstated claims of fundraising. "Then we'll be subject to additional regulatory pressures we've not had before."
In addition to instilling confidence, accurate accounting of fundraising dollars is important because it helps campus presidents and deans budget for the future, and it shapes funding decisions by state legislators.
UNLV's fundraising campaign stands out not just for its questionable accounting but for its silence - a startling silence given that such campaigns are all about developing publicity and excitement.
Nonprofit organizations and Foundations tend to trumpet their fundraising success.
The Nevada Cancer Institute, for instance, just announced a $15 million donation from the Engelstad Family Foundation to support research to improve the treatment of lung cancer. Ralph Engelstad, owner of the Imperial Palace, died of lung cancer in 2002.
The Institute also lists all of its donors on its Web site, assigning them to categories depending on the size of their gift. A $5 million donor is distinguished as a "visionary founder." Bishop Gorman High School has used the same technique in its successful campaign to build a new campus.
But since announcing the campaign 12 months ago, UNLV has held only two press conferences to announce major gifts. A few other gifts, mostly under $100,000, have been mentioned in the UNLV magazine or in college newsletters. The only news of the campaign's progress are updated tallies with no specific information about donors.
Lack of information about donors to the UNLV campaign goes against conventional fundraising wisdom. Development officers across the country, and Rogers in particular, repeatedly say that one of the best things a donor can give a university is the use of his name.
Gallagher and other Foundation officials attribute the quiet of the last year to donor modesty and a desire to stay out of the limelight so as not to be a target for other nonprofits.
But former and current Foundation employees claim the quiet reflects disappointing levels of giving, and some claimed that Gallagher wasn't just miscounting but actually making up pledges. Gallagher denies that categorically.
To investigate those claims, the Sun filed a formal records request to review evidence of pledges of more than $10,000 and a list of all transactions included in the campaign.
More than three weeks later, at Rogers' insistence after the Sun told him about the allegations, Gallagher provided the Sun with a list of all outstanding pledges and the gift transactions during the campaign. All identities, even of those gifts already made public, were removed.
The Sun was denied access to documents backing up the pledges. Gallagher said that releasing them - even with donors' names redacted - would violate donor confidentiality.
Gallagher and two of his top executives, Lucy Klinkhammer and Karen Druckman, said there were documents for every pledge except the verbal ones.
The Foundation needs more big fish.
Fundraising experts say campaigns should be launched only after 10 to 15 major donors have committed to giving half of the goal.
Over the last four years, UNLV has received 17 donations of $1 million or more, according to the Sun's review of 45,000 partly redacted donor transactions. The largest single payment was for $10 million - for the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. At the other end of the spectrum, most of the transactions were for $1,000 or less, meaning UNLV is essentially nickeling and diming its way to the $500 million mark.
Gallagher said UNLV will have to bring in a few more major gifts to hit its goal.
"You cannot be successful in a campaign without those gifts that bring you 1 percent, 3 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent of your total," Gallagher said. "And a campaign will fail without enough of those totals. But what constitutes enough (larger gifts) in a given campaign is going to be different than what constitutes enough in our campaign."
One wealthy donor and prominent Las Vegan told the Sun she was giving UNLV a token gift of $25,000 for the campaign. But she expressed reluctance to give more because she has too many questions about how money is spent and even about UNLV's ambitious goal of becoming a leading research university.
Gallagher acknowledged that some donors were taking a "wait-and-see" approach after the departure of Harter and the recent arrival of new President David Ashley.
Two major gifts will be announced in the next 60 days, Gallagher said. He indicated they will be the kind that let "us all sleep a little easier at night about the testamentary gifts in the equation."
Of the trustees who have contributed, only two disclosed their pledges to the Sun: Don Snyder for $1 million and Mark Yoseloff for $200,000. Terry Wright indicated he had made a major donation but would not say how much. Several others - Dan Van Epp, Carolyn Sparks, Jerry Herbst - all declined to say what they've donated. Most trustees did not return phone calls from the Sun.
The Sun tried to reach other obvious donors - including casino executives and developers - but they either declined comment or did not return calls.
Harter has said she planned to pledge $50,000. A redacted list of gifts from senior UNLV administrators shows pledges ranging from $4,000 to almost $12,000.
UNLV Foundation officials declined to provide a list of trustees or senior administrators at the university who had committed to the campaign.
Rogers says only time will tell whether he is to be praised for pushing UNLV to the next level or cursed for pushing the Foundation off a cliff.
"Of all of the places that are always bullish, and believe in a tomorrow and believe in our great ability to get things done, Las Vegas is No. 1," Rogers said. "The truth of the matter is, UNLV has come a long way."
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