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| Feature |
The Noble and the Needy
Matthew Schuerman
09/01/2004
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Bostock grew up in the
affluent suburbs of Montclair, N.J., and Edina, Minn., but when his father, an
insurance salesman, died in an automobile accident during the boy’s senior year
in high school, he left the family no money for college. His uncle, a Duke
alumnus and scout for the university’s Division I football team, was able to
recommend the young Bostock for a full athletic scholarship, which beat out
Harvard’s offer by $300 a year.
“Who knows what an experience it might have
been at Harvard, but I could not have had a better experience than at Duke, I
know that,” Bostock says. “As long as you showed up for practice, you could do
whatever you wanted to do. So I became an English literature major and loved it.
I really discovered learning.” He did make it to Harvard for an MBA, and then
went into advertising, as president of Benton & Bowles and later chairman of
BCom3 Group. Retired since 2001, Bostock now donates his time as chairman of two
organizations, the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and the Committee for
Economic Development.
Bostock’s giving to Duke started in a big way in 1978,
when then-president Terry Sanford cold-called a number of alumni in senior
management positions to serve on a new visiting committee that would advise the
business school. Bostock agreed to give both his time and money. Since then, he
has served in several governance positions, including as a trustee from 1991
until last July. His two daughters and one son are all Duke graduates as well.
The university recently completed a major campaign that helped raise its
endowment from a mere $700 million to just over $3 billion and funded a host of
building projects, among them, the Bostock Library, a five-story addition to its
system. Duke, one of the few universities to raise more than $2 billion in a
single fund-raising drive, now ranks 16th in size of endowment among higher
education institutions in the country.
In some ways, Bostock is not so much
a philanthropist as he is a booster of his one cause. He prefers to concentrate
his giving in ways that will have a large impact, and says he simply has not
found any other institution or organization that he trusts as much. Not only is
Duke wealthy and prestigious enough to use his money to draw top talent to an
endowed professorship, but it is also large and savvy enough to develop long
range plans for putting alumni donations to work.
His $2 million gift toward
the Duke libraries, for example, was part of a $40 million plan to expand and
modernize the university’s library system. “There are a lot of charities out
there to which people give money, and they are not always assured that that
money is well-handled and well-spent,” Bostock notes. “At Duke, they have laid
out a very clear strategy for what they want to accomplish.”
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