Venture Forward’s Enduring Impact

In the closing weeks of October, we celebrated both the completion of the Venture Forward campaign and the opening of the new Princeton University Art Museum. The coincidence was poetic: The Museum’s opening was a lovely illustration of how Venture Forward will benefit the University for generations to come.

The new Museum has already earned rave reviews for its architecture and its collection. Its opening week drew nearly 35,000 visitors. To put the number in perspective, that’s a crowd larger than our annual Reunions converging upon a single building. Those who visited will almost certainly return — if you’ve seen the Museum, you know it offers a magical experience. And if you haven’t seen it, you are in for a treat.

I expect that the Museum — and the Venture Forward campaign that made it possible — will enhance the experience of every undergraduate and graduate who comes to this campus. I confess that when I was a student, I passed by Princeton’s unprepossessing museum many times without, so far as I can recall, ever entering it.

I doubt that any future student will complete their Princeton journey without being tempted inside at least once. When they do enter, many will be inspired to take courses in fields and subjects that they might otherwise have overlooked.

The Museum’s impact will also extend beyond our campus, strengthening Princeton’s ties to our local community and the larger world. Many who participated in the festive opening came from the surrounding region and beyond. I am confident our new “town square for the arts and humanities,” as Museum director James Steward describes it, will continue to attract and delight people who might otherwise never visit our campus.

The new Museum is but one example of the many ways that Venture Forward has extended Princeton’s cherished traditions into the future, making us an even better and stronger University than before.

The question I hear most often about Venture Forward is, “How much did you raise?” It is tempting to reply with a dollar figure; the campaign was, I can say, the most successful in the University’s history. But we made Venture Forward a new kind of campaign, defined by mission rather than dollar targets, so I believe that the right question to answer is, “What did Venture Forward accomplish?”

People are the heart of Princeton, and so my favorite examples of the campaign’s impact pertain to its impact on the people we can bring to Princeton and the support we can provide to them:

• New undergraduate colleges and dormitories that made it possible to add 500 undergraduates to our student body;
• 350 new undergraduate scholarship funds that enabled Princeton to enhance what was already the best financial aid program in the world;
• 60 new graduate fellowship funds that helped the University make historic increases to graduate stipends; and
• 69 new professorships that will bring the world’s best teachers and scholars to Princeton.

Of course, Venture Forward also transformed our campus, adding beautiful facilities and programs that include not only the Museum but also the Class of 1986 Fitness and Wellness Center, the Frist Health Center, the Omenn-Darling Bioengineering Institute, Briger Hall (the new home of the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Department of Geosciences, and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), the Engineering Commons, and athletic facilities on Princeton’s new Meadows Campus south of Lake Carnegie, to name a few.

As I walk the campus and see the changes that Venture Forward has made possible, I am reminded again that Princeton is fortunate to have so many supportive alumni and friends. The campaign’s success resulted from the dedication and commitment of an extraordinary number of people. More than 75,000 donors made gifts to the campaign, many through Annual Giving.

Another novel feature of this campaign was Venture Forward’s emphasis on alumni engagement. Here, too, the breadth of alumni participation — through the Alumni Schools Committee, class activities, regional associations, affinity groups, Stand Up for Princeton, Annual Giving, and other initiatives — was breathtaking. More than 47% of undergraduate alumni, joined by a rapidly growing number of graduate alumni, volunteered precious time and talent to our alma mater.

I am grateful to everyone who participated in Venture Forward. Special thanks go to the Campaign Executive Committee and its amazing co-chairs, Blair Effron ’84, Katherine Bradley ’86, and James Yeh ’87. I also want to salute Vice President for Advancement Kevin Heaney, Deputy Vice President for Alumni Engagement Jen Caputo and her predecessor Alex Day ’02, and their marvelous team for running a history-making campaign that excelled even by Princeton’s high standards.

Venture Forward aimed, as we often said during the campaign, “to take us from the present to the possible.” On a campus that aims for genuine excellence in teaching and research, that work will always continue. In the months ahead, we will Venture Beyond. It was a pleasure, though, to pause for a moment in late October to celebrate exuberantly and express gratitude joyously to the many people whose dedication and generosity have improved Princeton so wonderfully.