Wanted for cash: SDSU drop-outs

They don’t know it yet, but thousands who graduated from San Diego State University are regarded by campus fundraisers as “lost.” To hit up the missing, the school has been combing through “thousands of digital files from 1986-2014,” according to the March minutes of SDSU’s Campanile Foundation. Even drop-outs are desirable from a rainmaking standpoint, the fundraisers say. “They found 2000 lost alumni and over 60,000 lost attendees.” Casting the net further still, “another project they are working on is to build Affinity Groups related to any of the activities the students were engaged in when they were here. They processed 3624 registration cards from the marching band, and of those 1324 are new to the database.”

The cash will likely come in handy; Campanile must come up with $2.5 million that president Elliot Hirshman insists is required to land a yet-to-be identified high-dollar professor. “There is a need to recruit a faculty member who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences to help our leading faculty become members of the National Academy,” board member Terry Atkinson explained. “President Hirshman mentioned that we have some great faculty members that cannot get into the academy without having someone in the academy nominate them.”

Adds the account, “President Hirshman concluded that this is just one of the initiatives we have planned to brand The Campanile Foundation. When you go to certain universities like Yale, you hear ‘Vanderbilt Hall,’ ‘Vanderbilt Endowed Chair,’ or ‘Vanderbilt Scholars.’ For us, The Campanile Foundation is going to be that branding. In the long run, we will pursue other ideas such as the ‘The Campanile Foundation Visiting Artist,’ or ‘The Campanile Foundation Coach.’ There is no timeline yet but there are possibilities for more opportunities, like the Campanile Foundation Endowed Chair.”