Spencer Thomas | editor-in-chief

$105,652 every day.

$4,402 each hour.

One dollar, two dimes and two pennies every single second for the last nine years.

That’s what Duquesne’s IGNITE fundraising campaign raked in since President Ken Gormley silently started it after taking office, before being publicly announced during Homecoming weekend in 2022.

Gormley announced over the weekend that the $333,333,333 fundraising goal had been reached. Over 25,000 people contributed to the campaign.

As the money comes in, many of the changes have already started to take shape on campus. This includes the construction of McGinley Hall and the College of Osteopathic Medicine, as well as renovations to the UPMC Cooper Fieldhouse. Gormley explained in an interview with The Duke how those buildings help more than just the Duquesne community, because they contribute to the growing prosperity of the neighborhood.

“That was a sort of blighted area, and we have been trying to transform it,” Gormley said. “I always like to refer to it as a glittering gateway between Downtown and Oakland, and it’s actually transforming the whole region.”

Gormley recalled a conversation he had back in 2016, with former County Executive Rich Fitzgerald that stressed the importance of the Uptown neighborhood. Gormley took that to heart, believing that construction of the medical school, dormitory and arena is helping him fulfill that duty to the city.

“You had better believe that that has gotten a lot of positive attention from our elected officials,” Gormley said, “because it’s what they’ve wanted to achieve, and we have been really good partners with them.”

Abigail Gardner, spokesperson for current County Executive Sara Innamorato, affirmed Gormley’s belief.

“We deeply appreciate Duquesne’s commitment to investing in the community. Duquesne’s strength and success pays dividends for Downtown, Uptown, and our entire regional economy,” she said to The Duke on Wednesday.

The campaign continued through the COVID pandemic, which obviously hurt people’s ability to contribute. People who were able to donate money were more likely to send it to the healthcare system in its time of need.

“There were a lot of things buffeting us around that there were times when I wasn’t sure we were going to make it in the beginning,” he said, “And so it’s just a wonderful feeling to know that we’ve achieved this.”

Thanks to the largest fundraising campaign in school history, there is now more than one-third of a billion dollars going toward university initiatives.

“It was a little bit scary picking that number,” Gormley said. “But we thought it represented that we were shooting higher than ever before.”

The money is split into transforming four different areas of the university: access and affordability, academic facilities and initiatives, integrating health care and what the university calls a “student-centered experience.” That split of the cash, more than $36 million, was raised for “student activities, physical and mental wellbeing initiatives, career development and athletics.” It includes grants of over $1 million dollars to club sports teams last school year, as well as supporting international programs such as Duquesne’s satellite campus in Rome, Italy.

Gormley also mentioned the new Wellbeing Center, stressing that “the best interest of the students is the polestar of everything we do.”

“We had a number of donors who specifically wanted to place a focus on physical and mental wellbeing as a fundamental piece of students being able to succeed and have a great opportunity here,” he said.

He talked to Provost David Dausey about how to best bolster student life, something he put at the top of his goals upon his hiring.

“You can see its impact everywhere, creating more and more opportunity for our students and for the region we call home,” Dausey said in a statement provided by the university.

While the fundraiser will continue until its June 30 end-date, Gormley and his team also have to focus on how they’re going to use the money.

Gormley explained that allocating the money is more complicated than it seems. For starters, lots of donations come in directed to a specific purpose chosen by the contributor. For instance, Thomas Kline’s $50 million donation to his now eponymous School of Law couldn’t just be taken and used for new uniforms for the tennis team.

“Much of the funds that come in for a capital campaign like this end up in the university’s endowment. But that’s not just a spending fund for whatever you want,” Gormley said.

Another way the university tries to make the most of these gifts is through being patient with the funds and allowing them to accrue interest that can be rolled back into the school’s pockets.

“Endowments are created so that these funds live on in perpetuity, but that means you can’t just spend them. You are spending the interest that they produce so that can continue for years,” Gormley said.

He singled out other donations such as those made by Bob and Joan Peirce, Bob Mallet and Kline as significant, not only because of what they do for students during their time at Duquesne, but after as well.

“The more the university gets positive attention for all of these different things we’ve been doing… that makes students degrees worth more when they graduate. As Duquesne becomes more and more viewed as a national Catholic university, a national player in so many of these domains, I guarantee you that makes a difference in terms of our students and our graduates getting top jobs and being able to compete against the other top universities in the country,” Gormley said.