Arts and Sciences on Campus 31 The good news when that happens is that departmental gifts are really college successes too. To raise money for the college, the dean has to pitch something that transcends the roster of academic departments. Part of the dean’s challenge is deciding whether to facilitate gifts rolling straight into departments, or make an effort to redirect some of those gifts toward the larger purposes of the college. This is a complex game of risk and reward. If the dean decides to facilitate departmental gifts, he/she may achieve the maximum possible donations from donors, but it is also likely the dean will preside over a college with rich and poor academic departments, because donor capacity and goodwill can vary so much by major. A chemistry graduate is more likely to be a sizable donor than a philosophy graduate. For the dean, facilitating maximum donations is a clear indicator of success, but it may come at a cost to internal peace. A college of Arts and Sciences faces other fundraising dilemmas. The college, intellectually diverse, lacks an easily explainable mission. Think about the simplicity of the School of Education’s mission of training teachers, or the School of Business educating the next generation of business leaders. The whole mission can be encapsulated in a sentence, or even a few words. In contrast, the mission of a college of Arts and Sciences is to deliver general education to all campus students, and then to move hundreds or even thousands of undecided and decided students through dozens of possible curricular paths. Trying to explain this vast educational role often results in a mission statement that sounds vague or undefined, such as training students to think critically or act globally. The sophisticated donor usually grasps the deep significance of the Arts and Sciences mission, but a donor pondering his/her first gift probably desires more explanation, or a concrete rallying point. Furthermore, lacking a nationally recognized accreditation process, a college of Arts and Sciences is disadvantaged relative to the professional schools. There is no single “seal of approval” for Arts and Sciences akin to professional school accreditation; there is no opportunity to use accredita- tion to leverage University resources, other than the isolated instances of accreditation that occur in Arts and Sciences’ departments such as chem- istry, public administration, journalism, or communication disorders.