What that has amounted to in recent weeks for Northwestern University is complaints from some two dozen alumni, about half of whom said they would withhold future donations.
She reached out to alumni and had half a dozen interviews.
Since 1891, Dartmouth alumni have elected half the board's members, giving them an unusual degree of alumni power.
Alumni have pledged half a million dollars, contingent on a promise that the school would rule out undergraduate tuition.
Paul Kooros, a Community alumnus who is half Iranian and half American, was in ninth grade when his family left for the United States in 1979.
Alumni feelings, even after half a century, sometimes run strong.
At the University of New Hampshire in Durham, affinity programs account for up to half the alumni association's budget, said Ernie Gale, executive director of the group, which covers 102,000 alumni.
The numbers, though, may be skewed; they are from a survey to which half the alumni responded, and it would seem likely that fewer teachers than, say, investment bankers, have lost touch with the organization.
The nation's improv hub, unquestionably, was Chicago, home of Second City, a 50-year-old theater that counts among its celebrated alumni Bill Murray, Steve Carell and about half the population of Canada.
Their stories stem from a new poll of alumni reporting that only half of those polled strongly agree that college was worth the cost of attending.
