Our institution has had a history of fundraising for departmental scholarships and asking the alumni (some of whom donated to the scholarship) to serve on the selection committee. We have intentionally either removed these committees (allowing financial aid to make the decision) or changed their makeup of the committee to be employees within that department. For nearly all of them, this has gone extremely smoothly.
However, we have one committee, which also happens to have been the first one of this kind created at our institution, which is trying to update its conflict of interest policy to allow its alumni to still select scholarship recipients. Their suggestion is that those who have contributed over $500 within the last 5 years are ineligible to serve on the committee and anyone who donated prior to that or less than that is outside of the realm of influencing their contribution. Mind you, this is an endowed scholarship so their contributions continue to feed the payout every year.
Members of our advancement team, including myself, feel that this gesture is not enough to escape the realm of donor control. I have spent more time than I probably should have searching the internet to find some source that might help the institution navigate this difference of opinion in a meaningful way.
If any of you have a resource you could share or a strong opinion one way or the other, we would appreciate the insight.
Joel
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Joel Clasemann
Director of Advancement Services
The College of Saint Scholastica
jclasema@css.edu------------------------------