Ah, here we are at Give Day again. I'm sure your email inbox is flooded with appeals.

To the best of my knowledge, donations to annual operation of athletics teams or the athletic department are handled genuinely, minus the "development tax" Mrak Hall skims off the top. So by all means if you want to donate to TeamAggie or particular teams, go for it. But there are things you need to know about other types of donations -

Scholarship/college funds - the appeals you get with a photo of a perfectly ethnically balanced group of students solving some problem that they received a scholarship for and they need your gift to continue. Sounds noble, but all is not all as it seems. A combination of the state and federal government decide what each student "should" pay. Let's say list price is $20k, but the factors say Johnny Student should pay $8k and the state pays $12k. Then Johnny works really hard to earn a $2k scholarship in that glossy photo that you donated toward. The $2k doesn't reduce Johnny's bill, he still pays $8k. The state's side of the bill gets reduced to $10k, but that $2k doesn't get sent back to the coffers in Sacramento. It now becomes flexible money for deans and vice chancellors to spend on things that get deans and vice chancellors recognized in Higher Education Monthly. Pet projects like diversity hugfest luncheons that you wouldn't have donated to, don't benefit many students, and are mainly make administrators look good. In most cases, Johnny Student will see more educational benefit if you personally hand him a $500 Safeway gift card than funnel a $2k donation through the UCD channels.

Endowment funds for particular causes - some, like endowed professorships have something specific they are spent on. But other times, the recipient organization kind of forgets about them, chairperson moves on, whatever, and the money just sits even when it is desperately needed. Other times, the University eases back state funding by whatever amount the endowment yields so the recipient organization never actually sees a benefit. The Chancellor sees the benefit with extra state money now coming his way for more of those hugfest luncheons. But that's not the worst thing. As it turns out, Vice Chancellors can decide to reallocate endowments to other causes without telling the donors. And if the donors find out, they got no recourse. No refunds, no input, nada, nothing. In the fine print it says the Chancellor can do whatever with the money and can change any rules or donor contracts retroactively to whatever he wants whenever he wants. It's like worse than Facebook terms of service. You might think this doesn't happen - but it does at least occasionally and it happened to me. Shaun Keister, Vice Chancellor of Development, basically told us to pound rocks, that the amount of money being mishandled was too small for anyone to care, and that our voices would never be loud enough to matter. And he may be right, but here I am in some small corner of the internet doing my part to remind folks that behind the smiles and handshakes, the 5th floor of Mrak Hall doesn't give a hoot about your wishes, students needs, or the University. Their singular priority is to find a way to use your money to enhance their personal CVs by funding pet projects that you probably don't support.