34 DEANS AND DEVELOPMENT specific gifts, but rather coordinates with a bevy of modestly informed gift officers. The dean can easily lose out to the professional schools, or to athletics, whose missions require much less explanation. At most Colleges and Universities, the principal fundraising conflict for the Arts and Sciences likely will be with athletics because the latter can plausibly claim all alumni as their own. Larger institutions opt for a constituency model, where the develop- ment officers are distributed across individual colleges and professional schools. This practical arrangement recognizes that no development officer can plausibly cover the donor base, nor be knowledgeable about the vast academic programming at a major University. At my own University, for instance, a development officer in the college of Arts and Sciences is responsible for understanding twenty-one undergraduate programs, fourteen master’s degrees, seven doctoral degrees, numerous service and research centers, and commitments to cross-cutting Univer- sity goals like retention, mentorship, and diversity. For the largest Univer- sities, the Arts and Sciences are even more bewildering, with as many as forty academic departments in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Typically, one or more development officers are assigned to the college of Arts and Sciences, tasked to work closely with the dean. This arrangement has the mirror opposite advantages and disadvantages of the centralized approach. The clear point of contact facilitates commu- nications with a development officer who better understands Arts and Sciences. If the dean shares in the funding of the development officer’s salary, there is more opportunity to shape the direction of fundraising. But constituency fundraising also has drawbacks. Development offi- cers (unless housed in major metropolitan areas where many alumni live in close proximity) struggle to cover the broad swath of territory where their donors reside. The development officer (or for that matter, the dean) is palpably disadvantaged in the sense that a single contribu- tion to some component of Arts and Sciences is less evident to a donor as a way to boost the whole. For example, a gift to accounting or finance is easily viewed as helping the business school as a whole; in contrast, a gift to physics does not help English much, just as a gift to psychology does not help earth sciences or French.