It's remarkable, because we were not a particularly popular campus for many, many years. Our curriculum was not well received locally; people were not happy with some things the administration had done. Yet 10 years after we opened our doors, these people were contributing very generously.
And that's remarkable. So we have a number of inhabitants on our side Weidner recruited community leaders for advisory panels even before he arrived in Green Bay. More than men and women from all over the region would eventually serve on 15 different committees.
Small wonder, then, that early in the history of the enterprise University officials would turn to the community for financial support of projects outside the budget. Conducted by Robert Bauer, that piece band and color guard would later strut its stuff at Packer games in Milwaukee as well as at Lambeau Field.
The Fort Howard Foundation and the Ansul Company of Marinette signed on early with funds for a two-way television network to link the University with the three outlying campuses. By April of , Assistant Chancellor Paul Davis, on the job seven months, had organized a development council to help in his quest for unrestricted gifts. The Varsity Club was born the following June. The club concentrated initially on fund raising for grants-in-aid to soccer and basketball players already recruited for the first season of competition.
Locally, the Rosenberg Foundation financed summer scholarships for high school students who could profit from a head start on college-level study. The funds provided a three-credit course for each of 15 promising young people. But only after Davis organized the Founders Association, late in , did the University find a reliable source of much-needed unrestricted contributions.
