A top university education - in fundraising

The call from Lisa was well-timed. I was alone in the house, bored, making my way through a pile of bills and correspondence that had accumulated in my in-tray. The perky voice of a young woman on the telephone inviting me to talk about myself was a welcome interruption.

Lisa (which might not have been her name) told me that she was an undergraduate at Cambridge. She was calling me from the Vice-Chancellor's office and wondered whether I had a few moments to discuss two matters. Firstly, she really wanted to hear about my own experiences at Cambridge which, she thought, would be of great assistance to her as a first-year undergraduate. Then there was the question of how I might be able to contribute to the Annual Fund, which would help future students benefit form the kind of education that I had enjoyed.

Coincidentally, I had just read a letter from the Vice-Chancellor, headed "Supporting Excellence", which had alerted me to the fact that I would be soon be hearing from undergraduates and encouraging me to "listen to them sympathetically". A week before, a message from another student had been left on my answering machine.

I was a tad suspicious. Like any householder, I receive calls from window-makers, insurance companies, time-share companies and the rest, and have found that they share a sales technique. Their call is never apparently about selling a product but is a chance to take advantage of a free offer, or contribute to important market research, or win a prize. I asked Lisa whether she really wanted to hear about my Cambridge days or whether getting me to reminisce was simply part of a softening-up process.

She seemed slightly hurt by this suggestion. She was in her first year at Trinity – "That was you college, wasn't it?" – and she thought the idea of ringing up graduates to find out what they gained from the university education was really good idea. For example, earlier that evening, someone had told her that being at Cambridge had taught him how to think.

This was all said with such innocent enthusiasm that I couldn't bring myself to bring myself to express the thinking that I was doing right then – that, if that hoary old cliché was the best insight her many calls had produced, then she must be having a very dreary time, cold-calling from the Vice-Chancellor's office. Only later did it occur to be that the line about learning to think might have been supplied to her by fund-raising types who knew that this kind of thing, suggestive of individuality and intellectual seriousness, played well with the clapped-out Sixties generation.

Instead, as instructed, I reminisced. I told Lisa that I regretted not having more fun at Cambridge, that I had been over-awed by the place, had played more sport than was good for me, that I was so nervous of failing exams that I had led a mousy, nondescript life as an undergraduate.

Funnily enough, Lisa said, she had already learnt that one should not take work too seriously. She was involved in the theatre, belonged to several societies and her studies were going too well too, but she had never realised how important donations from alumni were to a modern university. Now there were several different ways in which I might like to make a contribution...

So we had a financial conversation, at the end of which I let Lisa down very badly by failing to reach into my wallet. I take a grumpy line with uninvited selling calls and, even when the caller was as sweet and charming as she was, I object to being tapped up in this way.

In fact, after we had bid each other a cheery farewell, I found myself wondering whether there was not something faintly unsavoury in the way the Vice-Chancellor's "Supporting Excellence" appeal was being run. It was doubtless a cunning idea to deploy undergraduates in his call centre: students always need money and those on the receiving end of the calls would be less likely to hang up on someone who is attending their old college.

Then, because there were always going to be grumpy sods who would resent any assault on their credit cards, the process would be softened by making it appear that the student was looking for avuncular advice from an old-timer. Not only would they (and was it a coincidence that both my callers were girls?) be asking for financial contributions but, perhaps more importantly, for the benefit of a graduate's experience. A few minutes of nostalgia would ease their way into the fund-raising stuff.

Slightly cheesed off at the cynicism that this line suggested, I was more annoyed on behalf of Lisa and the other young callers. So this was what one of the world's great universities taught its first-year students: before anything else, learn how to market, charm, manipulate the punter, use every trick in the book in order to close a sale.

Now, too late, I realise the advice that I should have given Lisa. The Cambridge of 30 years ago may have been shambolic and unworldly, but a healthy distrust of those in authority, a natural bloody-mindedness, was in the air that we breathed. These days money may be central to the life of a modern university – a talent for fund-raising has explicitly been seen as an important qualification for Oxford's new Chancellor – but, as a student, she should do her best not to become contaminated by the marketing disease.

terblacker@aol.com