I commend it to your attention, as it is beautifully done and traces the sometimes-rocky relationship between the Endowment and the University. Happily, those days are long past. And it is an enormous gift for us. But, at the same time, the Endowment has major responsibilities to hospitals and health care, to children's needs, and to United Methodist churches and pastors, as well as to other colleges and universities. As we read and read and read these requests, there are certain elements and tones that recur with disturbing frequency.
People seem to have developed the same rationales for why their projects are worthy of support.
This is understandable, of course, but the repetition of identical motivations does not make any individual request stand out from the hundreds of others we see. And I suspect that you, as private individuals whose mailboxes are also full of appeals, may have noticed the same thing. Because we are helping those in need. Because we are good. Because we are worthy.