Loving “the one that brung him”
| Campaign UMass chair Jack Flavin ’59. (Thom Kendall photo) |
Almost more impressive,
in a certain way, than his big gifts – the $1 million for an endowed
chair honoring his brother Joe Flavin ’53, for example – are
some of the smaller, almost impulsive acts of generosity to UMass on the
part of Jack Flavin ’59.
Noting the antiquated state of the audio-visual gear in the Chancellor’s Boardroom in Whitmore, early in the campaign, Flavin quickly offered the money it would take to update it. Noting the crying need for renovations in 120 SOM, one of the main auditoriums in the Isenberg School – “I was really upset when I saw that” – he arranged to fill that need, too.
“The guy that got us there” is how development staff describe Flavin as national chair of Campaign UMass. Submitting to such compliments in December, in the cherry-paneled library of the Williams Club in Manhattan, where he was staying with members of his family for a few days between Christmas and New Year’s, this gracious guy made every effort to turn the attention to others.
The Isenberg family and their record-breaking gifts. The thousands and thousands of other donors. The development staff itself. Most of all Chancellor Scott, whose name Flavin raised three times in the course of the conversation. “I don’t think David’s role can possibly be exaggerated,” said Flavin. “This was our first campaign, remember. It’d never been done at UMass before. I think David was the key.”
As for the role he filled as campaign chair, Flavin acknowledges that you do have to be prepared to make leadership gifts – “within your own parameters, of course.” His own have totaled some $1.7 million to date. “And you have to be able to say a few words” on occasion, he adds. As Campaign UMass has steamed steadily toward its financial goals, the soft-spoken adoptive Texan has regularly been on hand to confer with campus leadership and to publicly personify the fund-raising effort.
Flavin is one who’s spoken eloquently of what education has done for his extended family – “It’s been a platform for what our family could accomplish,” he told the magazine near the beginning of the campaign – and educational institutions are prominent among the objects of his philanthropy. For example, he has relationships with Georgetown University, which his older daughter attended, and with Williams, where a nephew went to college. But UMass remains a primary interest, both because he believes in it and because it’s his.
“Supporting UMass is just a given for me,” said Flavin. “You know that old saying about dancing with the one that brung you? UMass is the one that brung me!”
