News from
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Office of Communications
Stanhope Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544-5264Contact: Justin Harmon (609) 258-5732
Date: October 24, 1998
Princeton Raises Campaign Goal to $900 Million to Support Financial Aid and Academic Programs
PRINCETON, N.J. -- Princeton University will raise the goal of its current fund-raising campaign to increase support for financial aid and establish new scholarly programs in genomics, religion and the humanities. Following the recommendation of the alumni leadership of the Anniversary Campaign for Princeton, the Board of Trustees voted today to raise the campaign goal from $750 million to $900 million.
The Anniversary Campaign has already raised a total of $665 million, for scholarships, teaching innovations, new research initiatives and an extensive program of construction and renovation on the University's landmark campus. Building on the success of this effort, which encompasses both gifts for specific capital projects and unrestricted support through Annual Giving, the five-year campaign will seek to raise an additional $235 million by June 30 of the year 2,000.
"The generosity of so many alumni and friends over the past three years and a number of exciting new opportunities," said Princeton President Harold T. Shapiro, "have inspired us to do more to secure the future of this University and to enhance our capacity to serve this nation and the global community. Increasing our campaign objective is certainly ambitious, but then so are our aspirations in the fields of teaching, learning and research."
The single greatest need to be addressed by the expanded goal is scholarship funding. The campaign will seek to permanently endow new financial aid policies that make it significantly more affordable for low and middle income students to attend the University. Since these policies were announced last spring, they have gained national attention, spurring many major universities to follow Princeton's lead in broadening access to higher education for students of all backgrounds.
Two of the important new academic projects to be funded by the campaign are in the humanities. To explore the manifestations of religion in national life and international relations - a subject rarely studied outside of denominational seminaries - the University plans a new interdisciplinary center for the study of religion. In addition, a new post-graduate fellowship program will be launched to bring outstanding young humanities scholars to Princeton at the start of their academic careers - giving them access to the University's library, faculty and other pedagogical resources and providing opportunities for them to share their talents and fresh ideas across the wide campus community.
In the life sciences, the University will expand on the achievements of the Department of Molecular Biology and the continually growing interest of Princeton students in the biological sciences to establish a new state-of-the-art center for research in the emerging field of genomics. In a multidisciplinary setting, biologists, physicists, chemists, mathematicians and computer scientists will work together to transform the growing wealth of information on the human genome into real breakthroughs in basic biology and medicine.
"With each of these initiatives I believe we will build on Princeton's existing strengths in new and distinctive ways," said President Shapiro, "Our academic traditions stretch back many generations, yet they constantly renew themselves through innovative projects such as these."
More than 73 percent of Princeton's alumni have already participated in the Anniversary Campaign for Princeton since it was officially launched in 1995. Among the many Campaign initiatives that are already in use or under development are a new campus center, a dormitory, and football and track-and-field stadiums; new programs in the environment, finance and Jewish studies, and new facilities for the teaching of physics, music, the social sciences and engineering.