Monmouth looks forward to bright future with new Vice President for Advancement

By: Michelle Anstett
Editor-in-chief

Raising large sums of money for college advancement projects is a difficult job, but with more than 25 years of fundraising experience, J. Lance Cavanagh is up to the challenge.

Cavanagh, one of four candidates interviewed by the Monmouth College Vice President for Advancement search committee, recently accepted the position as Vice President for Advancement and will begin his duties May 1.

“Lance seemed like such a good fit for the campus,” Monmouth College President Mauri Ditzler said, and “we’re hoping he’ll build an effective advancement organization on campus.”

With the decision of Perry White in fall 2006 to return to his tenured post in the music department, the college was left without its chief advancement officer, instigating a nationwide search to fill the position. The college hired Judith Ward, an academic search consultant with Academic Search Inc., to facilitate the search. Ward spent a few months e-mailing and calling the advancement and fundraising directors at various colleges, attempting to find someone who would be willing to consider the open position at Monmouth.

After thousands of e-mails and phone calls, the college received approximately 35 applicants, from which the interview pool of four was chosen.

“It was important to do this [the interview process] with some confidentiality,” Ditzler stated, noting that the interviewees already hold positions at other colleges, and people knowing of their job search could ruin future effectiveness in those positions. These interviews were held at an off-campus location, and the committee was planning to bring two of the candidates to campus at a later date to conduct a final round of interviews.

However, once the interviews were completed, the committee made the recommendation that Cavanagh be the only candidate invited to campus. He was offered the Vice President for Advancement position and accepted.

Cavanagh graduated from the College of Saint Scholastica in 1979, and has held senior-level development positions at seven colleges and universities. In order to take the position at Monmouth, he will be leaving Pro Video Productions Inc., in Duluth, Minn., where he has been vice president and chief operating officer. Cavanagh has also held fundraising positions at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Iowa State University, Wright State University, Beloit College, University of Minnesota-Duluth, University of Nevada-Reno and Southwest Minnesota State University.

In the past, Ditzler said, the college has “traditionally had a very ‘lean’ fundraising group.” By this he means the staff has been small, and the task of soliciting the major gifts – those in the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars – has fallen solely to the vice president. It is the current administration’s hope that Cavanagh will take the solid worker base already present in the development office and expand upon it, training a larger core of people who can assist with obtaining those major gifts.

With the college’s next major building project, the academic complex to house the business and science departments, expected to cost an estimated $40 million, and another goal for doubling the college’s endowment, the search committee needed to find a candidate who it felt could sustain the fundraising pressures of the next decade. “Our needs for the next 10 years are such that it would not be possible for a single person to raise all those funds,” Ditzler asserted, and the committee believed Cavanagh could build the team necessary to reach those fundraising goals.

Obtaining gifts from major donors is not the Vice President for Advancement’s only duty, though. Cavanagh will be in charge of overseeing the maintenance of the annual fund, which provides the monetary means for the day-to-day operation of the college, he will be “responsible for helping to promote the general reputation of the college” in order to help raise those funds, overseeing the college communications staff and managing alumni relations. While this seems like a long list of duties for one person, Ditzler said they are all somewhat related, in that the college’s communications and alumni relations play a large part in whether or not it receives donations, large and small, from alumni and the outside world.

While the college has filled the vacancy in the Vice President for Advancement position by hiring Cavanagh, there is still a vacant spot in the Vice President for Enrollment Management position, created when John Klockentager announced in fall 2006 that he would be leaving the Monmouth College staff.

Ditzler said the college is currently in the process of evaluating what it wants someone in that position to be responsible for, and is not immediately planning to conduct a search for a candidate. In Klockentager’s absence, Christine Johnston, associate dean of admission, has stepped up and taken control of the Admission Office. The director of financial aid, Jayne Schreck, has been working with Don Gladfelter, Vice President for Finance and Business, to coordinate the financial aid side of the vacant position.

Currently, with these two women helping to fill the void, Ditzler believes “we’re [the college] ready to examine hiring a new Vice President for Enrollment Management, but we haven’t yet decided how to respond. We are at a position of strength right now with two experienced people at admission and financial aid,” and the college may decide hiring a new vice president would be a redundancy.

Despite this potential change in the current organization of college administration, Monmouth College welcomes J. Lance Cavanagh as the new Vice President for Advancement, expecting great things to come from him in the future.