Where do you get that about Wente? Given all the campus construction over the last 10-15 years and the burgeoning NIL issue, I imagine most of the big donors are tapped out. Also keep in mind, there was a lot of panicking about an upcoming recession in 2022 and 2023.
In general,
Wake Forest is in very good shape financially: it has an endowment of about $1.9B (that's an impressive amount though Wake's
endowment per student of $217K puts it at #102 among U.S. colleges and universities); it is able to charge Ivy league-level prices for tuition, room and board; and it receives annual donations of between $80-154M per year (the variability probably depends on whether a major capital campaign is going on and whether any very big donations were received for a sports building .
Most of the new construction on the Reynolda campus from recent years has been for non-academic functions: new dorms, impressive athletic facilities, a new dining hall and a small addition to Worrell. The big exception is Farrell Hall, home of the combined grad and undergrad b-schools. Farrell Hall was built during the Hatch regime but the only thing that Hatch had to do with it was his hiring of Steve Reinemund as business dean- Reinemund was the guy who raised the $54M for Farrell Hall. Hatch also had little to do with raising the money for new athletic buildings: Wake alumni McCreary, Sutton and Shah pretty much decided among themselves that Wake had to build campus sports palaces to keep up with its competition in the ACC and elsewhere.
It has been a while since Wake built a new classroom building for the benefit of students and faculty other than those in the b-school. The last major one was Greene Hall (originally named East Hall), which was named after Wake alum Bill Greene.
Greene's donation of $5M to Wake put his name on the building after it had been built, so his donation was important but not essential to getting the building built. Anyway Greene Hall was built during the Hearn years.
In sum, it has been challenging for a long time to raise the money for a brand new classroom building for students and faculty in the arts and sciences.
But the need has been there for a long time. Hatch clearly wanted to do it. It was supposed to be his final achievement as president. The proposed building project on Davis Field even progressed in 2019 as far as doing soil tests on the proposed site. But then came the pandemic and everything changed. I guess it's a legit excuse for Hatch not to have gotten the job done, but the fact is that he never raised the money needed.
When Wente was hired, it should have been obvious that Wake needed a president who could raise the money needed for a new classroom building. The need and the proposal were already there under Hatch. The trustees should have looked for someone who had already served as a president at another school and proved to be a good fund raiser. Instead they hired Wente who, like Hatch, was provost (i.e. chief academic officer) at a more prestigious school) but who didn't have a either a track record or the skill set of a fund raiser. Whether you agree with it or not, the main job of a university president is to raise money. Wente has now proven that she is not good at raising money by quickly abandoning the idea of building a new classroom building and falling back on a cheaper, less ideal plan as described in the latest master plan update.