On Octo­ber 1, 1959, Trustees and Alumni gath­ered in Prince­ton for a sig­nif­i­cant event. “This cause we serve is a cause of great impor­tance to all Amer­i­cans and through­out the Free World,” James F. Oates ’21 boomed, before hand­ing over the micro­phone to Judge Harold R. Med­ina ’09 and Pres­i­dent Bob Goheen ’40. The cause was Princeton’s $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign, and the 500 alumni from twelve dif­fer­ent states, the first vol­un­teers for the cam­paign, were attend­ing the kick-off meet­ing of the total solic­i­ta­tion phase.

Oates, the Chair­man of the $53 Mil­lion Cam­paign, may have sounded over­wrought, but the three-year cam­paign was of his­tor­i­cal pro­por­tions indeed. It was Princeton’s first pro­fes­sional fund rais­ing effort, run with the help of the new Devel­op­ment Office (estab­lished in 1956), a fund rais­ing firm, and ulti­mately almost 5,000 vol­un­teers, coor­di­nated by eight regional offices from coast to coast. The finan­cial goal was of his­tor­i­cal pro­por­tions too, and so was the list of projects to be funded, includ­ing $30 mil­lion for new build­ings on cam­pus, includ­ing the Engi­neer­ing Quad, the New Quad, the Wool­worth Music build­ing, and the School of Archi­tec­ture. Thus, the $60.7 mil­lion raised by the end of the cam­paign, pledged by 17,925 donors, enabled the growth and change with which the pres­i­dency of Robert F. Goheen (1957–1972) has come to be associated.