PR ESIDEN T ’S ME S SAG E
This truly is a historic moment. Creating Our Future: The Campaign for Skidmore will be remembered decades from now as a defining moment for Skidmore College.
The thanks we want to convey, the gratitude, for this achievement are profound. I want to start with our four Campaign co-chairs: Nancy W. Hamilton ’77 and W. Scott McGraw P’12, the original co-chairs of the campaign when it was first conceived and launched, and Tom Wilmot ’99 and Susan Gottlieb Beckerman ’67, who assumed the direction of the campaign in its final years. To all our donors and volunteers — literally thousands and thousands of you, including alumni, parents, trustees, friends, staff and faculty, and students — you are the heart and soul of this campaign. And to my predecessor, Phil Glotzbach, and his wife Marie Glotzbach, who guided Skidmore in the decade leading up to this campaign, as well as through the campaign’s many steps and triumphs, the gratitude I feel for all you accomplished for Skidmore is beyond measure. For I came late to this party. This campaign was some 2,700 days in the making, and I’ve been here for about 270 days — so more or less 10% of the campaign. As I’ve said on other occasions, I feel like I was brought in to pitch, not even the last inning of this game, but maybe the last pitch to the last batter. Yet these were important pitches. In the final six months of the campaign, when we decided to extend it by half a year to bring it to the strongest conclusion we could, we raised an additional $17.4 million — over 13% of the campaign total in the final six months. This gave me a chance to work right alongside the campaign leadership and our superb Advancement colleagues, and that has indeed been an honor and a great education in how to do this work well.
26 | CREATING OUR FUTURE
