Emory intends to raise $1.6 billion

Hoping to secure its place as the Southeast’s foremost private university, Emory has launched the public phase of a $1.6 billion — that’s billion — fund-raising campaign.

Officials planned a grand gala for Thursday night to roll out the drive, the most ambitious in the university’s 172-year history.

But Emory isn’t starting from scratch.

More than $800 million has been pledged toward the goal since September 2005, when fund-raisers began quietly approaching deep-pocketed potential donors.

The campaign is scheduled to run through 2012.

University president James Wagner acknowledged that hard economic times could slow the rate at which gifts arrive. But he said there was no hesitation to go forward with the campaign.

Wagner said he believes philanthropists will see the request as an opportunity to invest in society. “The knowledge market,” he said, “is much more stable than the financial market.”

The goal “is very ambitious,” said Russell Hardin, president of the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation, Emory’s major donor, “but Emory’s ambitions are huge.”

Funds given to Campaign Emory will be used to recruit and retain top scholars, expand programs, construct new buildings and offer financial aid to students from families with incomes of $100,000 or less, campaign officials said.

Areas of emphasis include medicine and global health, religion and ethics, law and sciences.

All major divisions of Emory will benefit, from the two-year Oxford College near Covington to the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

One goal, Wagner said, is to add 100 new faculty members to Emory College of Arts and Sciences, the university’s largest undergraduate division, without greatly increasing Emory’s 12,600-person student body.

Thirty of those professors already have come on board through early fund-raising efforts, he said.

Among the early pledges are large gifts promised by two of Atlanta’s most prominent philanthropic organizations.

In 2006, the Woodruff foundation, funded with money from the late Coca-Cola magnate Robert W. Woodruff, pledged $261.5 million to expand the Emory Clinic outpatient facilities and services.

On Tuesday, the DeKalb County Commission approved permits to begin construction of a new clinic building.

Last year, the O. Wayne Rollins Foundation and Rollins’ family committed $50 million toward the university’s Rollins School of Public Health.

Rollins’ business ventures included pest control, broadcast stations and real estate. A new public health building is under way.

Foundations alone can’t provide for all of Emory’s projects, said Hardin of the Woodruff Foundation.

“Emory has risen to the top tier of national universities,” he said. “To keep on that trajectory, the university will have to continue to broaden its base of support and win increased support from its alumni.”

Both Emory’s endowment and its reputation have escalated since 1979 when Robert Woodruff and his brother, George, made a gift credited with taking the school into the ranks of the nation’s leading universities. Their $105 million donation was the largest in the history of American higher education at the time.

Emory’s prestige rose further in the 1980s, when former President Jimmy Carter established the Carter Center as an Emory affiliate.

More recently, the Dalai Lama XIV was named a presidential distinguished professor, and author Salman Rushdie became writer-in-residence. The school acquired Rushdie’s papers, as well as those of writer Alice Walker.

Through its high-profile figures, the university also has become part of international controversies — Jewish criticism of Carter’s positions on the Middle East, tension roiled by China’s control of the Dalai Lama’s native Tibet and Muslim antipathy toward Rushdie over his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

Ben Johnson III, the lawyer and alumnus who heads Emory’s board of trustees, sees even the controversies as a plus for the university.

“Emory is a place that has the courage to deal with issues other places won’t deal with,” he said. “If those issues aren’t dealt with, they’ll never get solved.”

Emory’s last major fund-raising campaign was in the mid-1990s.

Johnson said the university won’t wait so long for the next one.

“When this campaign is over, I can assure you there will already be a plan in place for the next campaign,” he said. “We’re not going to let any moss grow under our toes.”