Hopkins Launches $900 Million Campaign

The boards of trustees of the institutions -- The Johns Hopkins University and The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System -- will meet Saturday morning in joint session to adopt the $900 million goal.

Key alumni volunteers and members of divisional advisory councils will meet immediately afterwards to endorse the trustees' action. Celebrations of the campaign launch will continue throughout the day, culminating in a gala dinner under the stars on Garland Field at the university's Homewood campus [see accompanying schedule].

"The Johns Hopkins Initiative will address the needs of the 1990s -- and beyond -- by focusing on two areas crucial to the future of the Johns Hopkins Institutions: endowment and facilities," said Michael R. Bloomberg, a 1964 Hopkins graduate and chair of the new campaign.

"It is no secret," he said, "that, compared with peer institutions of similar size, The Johns Hopkins University is under-endowed. And it is no secret that changes in the health care industry necessitate new and flexible responses from the nation's hospitals, such as the comprehensive Cancer Center now being constructed at Johns Hopkins Hospital."

Therefore, Bloomberg said, fully 58 percent of the campaign's overall goal -- or $525 million -- will be devoted to endowment and to facilities projects. The remainder -- $375 million -- will provide current program support, he said.

The university's president, William C. Richardson, said targeting endowment as a special priority reflects a determination to preserve Johns Hopkins' role as a world leader in education, research and patient care.

"Johns Hopkins University seeks to maintain its position as an institution of the future," Dr. Richardson said. "We are, in short, committed to exploring the new, discovering the unforeseen, and responding to the unexpected with all the vigor, verve and flexibility that has defined this institution in the past.

"To do this," he said, "requires more than will. There must be a way. In an increasingly uncertain fiscal environment, we have to look to multiple sources for assistance with new and worthy projects. Increasingly, we must find new avenues of growth, new centers of support. This is where endowment -- the one certain source of income for the future -- can mean so much to Johns Hopkins."

Bloomberg announced that, before Saturday's public launch of the campaign, the institutions already have raised 30.5 percent of the overall goal, a total of $274.6 million in pledges or actual gifts. About 70 percent of that total is in endowment or capital commitments.

The largest advance gifts were the $50 million pledged in 1992 to the School of Arts and Sciences endowment by the Zanvyl and Isabelle Krieger Fund and the $20 million gift to the Eisenhower Library announced today by R. Champlin and Debbie Sheridan [see accompanying release].

Johns Hopkins Medicine has a minimum goal of $455 million -- just over half the overall $900 million goal -- with $100 million of that total slated for The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System and the balance for the university's School of Medicine.

"The kind of philanthropic generosity that helped make the Hopkins institutions synonymous with excellence is not a luxury but a necessity if such excellence is to continue," said James A. Block, president of The Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System. "While it is impossible to place a dollar value on good health and well-being, it is impossible to assure them without significant financial resources."

After Johns Hopkins Medicine, the next largest divisional goals are $140 million for the university's School of Arts and Sciences, $80 million for the School of Hygiene and Public Health, $50 million for the Whiting School of Engineering and $40 million for the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies [see accompanying campaign fact sheet for additional details].

Of the health system's $100 million goal, $44 million is targeted for Cancer Center construction. Other important facilities projects covered by the campaign include a new School of Nursing building, a new School of Hygiene and Public Health building, renovations for Engineering School buildings, new student life and recreation facilities at the Homewood campus, and renovations of the Eisenhower Library at Homewood.

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