This dissertation charts that growth of the profession of fundraising at American colleges and universities. Fundraising has been central to college and university operations from the beginning of American higher education; the fundraising professional, however, is a 20th century phenomenon. From their first campaigns to erect a building or provide a scholarship fund, fundraisers grew a place in the contemporary university with nonstop fundraising operations staffed by professionals. The profession has built codes of conduct, developed training and certification programs, and found best practices to do its job well. This dissertation is a history these developments. As the costs to operate a university rose and the usefulness of private donors to meet those costs became ever clearer, the scope of fundraising as a job changed. The occasional campaigns and alumni organizations merged into regular, annual fundraising efforts from alumni punctuated by ever-larger campaigns. The campaigns--annual and occasional--at elite, expensive-to-operate private universities spread down the prestige ladder to less elite private colleges and universities. Public colleges and universities were among the early institutions to run campaigns--often for stadiums--but they, by the 1960s, also undertook large-scale annual fundraising to provide a "margin for excellence" beyond state appropriations. As state appropriations declined, fundraising become more urgent and essential. Community colleges were not far behind. As the profession of educational fundraising developed, a tension emerged among practitioners roughly split along the lines of those who affiliated with the association of alumni professionals and those who affiliated with the public relations professional association. In 1958, the two professional organizations collaborated on a report that outlined the functional areas of a new profession--what came to be called university advancement. A cadre of leaders in the alumni group saw a path toward merging the two organizations and outlined their objections. The college alumnus was too important to treat as "just another public," they argued, and unification of public relations and alumni relations would render the service to alumni and the alumni feeling into something vulgar. The strength of alumni professionals' objections to merger staved it off for a period of time, but by the 1974 merger of the two professional associations into the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), the urgency of increasing fundraising revenue was too much to worry about what was lost. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]