persecution of students based on a political agenda(yes I know they hide behind directives from the DofE in the form of a dear colleague letter…they had no choice…blah blah I know I know…know… but schools like amherst as of 2017 now see it as a badge of honor to stand up to the DofE…weird how that works) and allowing an innocent student to be persecuted…while allowing the person filing the complaint to be protected. is disturbing. (to put it nicely)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/georgeleef/2017/04/09/wrongfully-expelled-student-hauls-elite-college-into-court/#4d49d1a91929
Seems the dim predictions about alumni support due to the mascot change, race protests, possible athletic changes etc have proven to be unfounded.
Not a controlled experiment.
One could easily argue that with stock market and real estate values being at all-time highs, the resultant ‘wealth effect’ is the driving force behind increased contributions. Maybe without all of those negative events/pieces the fund would have netted far more contributions.
Just sayin’.
Maybe other people don’t think they are negative changes. Just sayin’. 
Point well-taken. Personally I think that some of that stuff is positive, and that some of it is, shall we say, less positive. I put the “negative” in there because I read @OHMomof2’s note as implying that one might have thought that those issues would negatively impact contributions, but that they in fact did not. All I’m sayin’ is that we don’t know whether they had any impact whatsoever, and if they did, whether it was a positive or negative impact. Just too many variables.
True one never knows what might have been. But clearly things are going well enough with the alumni that a new giving record has been set.
Perhaps even if older alumni are holding back because they love Lord Jeff or whatever, it seems the younger alumni have stepped in a way that young alumni haven’t done before.
I’ve talked to more than a couple alumni who are quite disappointed with the mascot name change. So these numbers surprise me, to say the least. How high would the contributions have been without the name change? I wonder.
Schools survive mascot changes, even with alumni resisting change.
In the 1970’s Stanford went from Indians to Cardinal (the color, not the bird or church official)
I have done an exhaustive search throughout my Crayola box, and I can’t find the Cardinal crayon.
Here in Ohio we call that color SCARLET @AsleepAtTheWheel