Bright lights, great expectations. At Caltech’s campaign kickoff celebration,
the evening’s master of ceremonies, PBS interviewer Charlie Rose, addressed
invited guests under a campus big top.

There’s Only One

As it launches its ambitious campaign to raise $1.4 billion over the next five years, Caltech has chosen a motto symbolizing the Institute’s century-plus record of achievement at the frontiers of science and technology: “There’s only one. Caltech.”

At an October 25 kickoff celebration marking the start of the campaign’s public phase, David Baltimore explained the significance of those simple-yet-evocative words. “The phrase tells it all. There is no other place like this one,” Caltech’s president told some 400 Institute friends, donors, and supporters who filled a voluminous party tent pitched on the campus athletic field.

Charlie Rose, the Emmy award–winning public-television interviewer and the evening’s master of ceremonies, put it this way: “What is the most influential thing that will have the most impact in the new century? Clearly, science and technology is the answer. What Einstein did in the 20th century is probably what someone from Caltech will do in the 21st.”

Rose, who hosts The Charlie Rose Show on PBS, also served as moderator for a series of panel discussions held the following day in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. “A Celebration of Caltech Science” included faculty presentations and discussions of the latest Institute research into the brain, earth science, and the universe, and showcased the Institute’s interdisciplinary strengths, which form a cornerstone of the campaign.

Scheduled to run until 2007, the campaign is chaired by Wally Weisman, the vice chair of the Caltech trustees, who will work closely with Gary Dicovitsky, Caltech’s new vice president for development and alumni relations, and his campus development staff. (In an interview on page 14, Dicovitsky offers his perspective on the campaign.)

At the kickoff celebration, guests caught their first glimpse of some of the themes that will define the Caltech fund-raising drive as they watched a specially commissioned campaign video entitled Infinite Possibilities, which includes, among many other vignettes, Provost Steve Koonin’s recipe for Institute success: “You take small, interdisciplinary, and bold, put them together, and magic happens.”

That unique intellectual alchemy has been part of the Caltech scene for decades, said Ben Rosen ’54. The chair of the Institute’s board of trustees told the audience that the Caltech of today exudes a passion for knowledge and discovery that is as strong today as when he stepped on campus as a freshman 52 years ago.

Looking toward the Caltech of tomorrow, Baltimore characterized the $1.4 billion campaign figure as ambitious, yet realistic. The monetary goal reflects the aspirations and dreams of the faculty, he said, and also takes note of nuts-and-bolts needs, like replacing and upgrading campus infrastructure. Key components include funding to enrich student life, to support innovative research programs, and to construct new buildings. “Of course, for a school with fewer than 20,000 living alumni, it may seem like hubris to try to raise such a remarkable sum,” Baltimore told the audience.

But he noted that the Institute had already been the beneficiary of a remarkable gift—$600 million from Trustee Chair Emeritus Gordon Moore, PhD ’54, and his wife, Betty, and the Moore Foundation. Caltech showed its appreciation at the kickoff event, when JPL director Charles Elachi, PhD ’71, announced the naming of an asteroid in Moore’s honor and presented the couple with a commemorative plaque about “asteroid 8013 Gordonmoore” and a desktop model of the Mars Exploration Rover, which is slated to explore the Red Planet in 2004.

Along with the Moore gift—the largest commitment in the history of higher education—Caltech has raised approximately $200 million during the “quiet” period of the campaign, for a total of about $800 million.

With slightly less than half their monetary goal to go, Caltech leaders are banking on a successful campaign that will allow the Institute to carry out a wide range of groundbreaking research, from new investigations into the large-scale structure of the universe to the fabrication of revolutionary devices at the nanolevel of atoms and molecules. Said Baltimore, “We want to find the big new opportunities in the intellectual world, the great unknowns.” All these endeavors will require state-of the-art facilities and equipment to ensure that Caltech can continue to attract and support the most outstanding scholars and students.

The campaign goals fall into three major areas: endowment, which encompasses funds for people and programs; buildings; and equipment. The $810 million earmarked for endowment will be used to support new professorships, faculty reinvention funds for professors wishing to change direction in their research, and faculty start-ups. This category also includes the visiting scholars program; graduate and postdoctoral fellowships; and Discovery Funds, which enable faculty to pursue promising, untried avenues of research without going through the usual bureaucratic funding hassles. This support will also be applied to undergraduate financial aid; the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program; and the President’s Fund, which fosters enhanced JPL/campus interactions.

The Institute is seeking $400 million for buildings, more than half of which is designated for the renovation and expansion of existing structures. These include undergraduate and graduate student residences, Dabney Hall for the Humanities, the Robinson Laboratory of Astrophysics, biology laboratories, and the Caltech Children’s Center. Funds in this category will also be applied to campus infrastructure renewal and an Athenaeum maintenance endowment.

As for new structures, Caltech has a wish list of facilities that will support world-class interdisciplinary research. The Institute is seeking funds for a new astrophysics laboratory that would unite campus astronomy and astrophysics under one roof; a multidisciplinary information sciences building; a chemistry teaching/research laboratory that would meet both present and future needs for undergraduate and graduate chemistry instruction; and a new campus-center building.

The $190 million earmarked for equipment will support the design and acquisition of an array of state-of-the-art instrumentation. This includes a design proposal to construct a new telescope three times the size and with nine times the light-gathering power of the two Keck Telescopes on Mauna Kea. Funds will also be used to relocate the Owens Valley Radio Observatory and to support the creation of a Combined Array for Research in Millimeter-Wave Astronomy (CARMA). The
Institute also envisions creating a first-of-its-kind center that will bring seismology, space geodetic techniques, and field geology to bear on the global study of tectonic plate movement.

Moving from the extremely large scale to the extremely small, instrumentation needs also include a cryoelectron microscope, imaging magnets, nanofabrication facilities, and a synchrotron beamline that will be used to probe and study the structures of proteins. Funds in the equipment category will also help pay for instrumentation and distributed and central computation in all divisions.

Reflecting on Caltech’s unique character, Baltimore talked at the campaign kickoff about streams of visitors to campus who ask him how to replicate the Institute. “I wish them well, but they are doomed to failure because you can’t create a place like this overnight.” Thanks to George Ellery Hale’s foresight and Robert Millikan’s devotion, Caltech found its enduring ideology, he said. The financial backing of the local community, coupled with contributions from America’s first great philanthropists, brought that philosophy to life. “The secret of Caltech is that it was born from the vision of a few great people who believed that a new type
of institution could be built in Southern California and who then made it happen.”

Of course, it will take more than imagination and vision to help Caltech achieve its current goal and fulfill its aspirations for the future. Baltimore emphasized that the Institute will be asking for the help of a great many people, from individual donors to corporate and foundation sources.

“Research and education are expensive today, and particularly expensive when you are pushing the frontiers,” Baltimore said. “We will need the help of every person here, as well as every person who knows and believes in the vision of Caltech. We can make unique contributions to America and the world but we can only do it with the commitment of those who believe as we do that a society which builds on knowledge and adapts technology to enrich life is a society in which each individual can fulfill his or her greatest dreams and loftiest goals.”

More information on the campaign can be found at http://one.caltech.edu.