G. David Gearhart

In 1977, Gearhart was appointed the director of development at Westminster College and led fundraising efforts for the Winston Churchill Memorial and Library. He returned to his native state in 1978 to become vice president for development at Hendrix College. After four years at Hendrix, Gearhart was selected to be the director of development at the University of Arkansas. In 1985, Gearhart was appointed vice president for development and university relations at Pennsylvania State University, becoming senior vice president three years later.

While at Penn State, he launched a major capital campaign, which raised in excess of $352 million. Total private gifts to Penn State during his 11 years at the university surpassed $950 million. In 1995, Gearhart joined the international consulting firm of Grenzebach, Glier, and Associates as senior vice president and managing director.[5]

Gearhart returned to Arkansas in 1998 as vice chancellor for university advancement at the University of Arkansas. In that capacity, he was the architect of the Campaign for the Twenty-First Century, a billion-dollar capital campaign that concluded in June 2005 with the University of Arkansas taking its place as one of only 13 public universities at that time to have exceeded a billion dollars raised.[6]

The centerpiece of this campaign was a $300 million gift from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation, the largest gift ever made to a public university. The direct results of Gearhart’s leadership in this effort included the creation of 132 new endowed faculty positions, 1,738 new student scholarship and fellowship funds, dozens of new and renovated facilities and classrooms, and growth of the overall endowment from $119 million in 1998 to nearly $900 million by the time he assumed the chancellorship.[7]

In 2013, Gearhart became involved in a scandal with then Vice Chancellor for University Advancement Brad Choate over budget shortfalls in the fundraising division of the institution.[8] Choate, whose contract was not renewed, oversaw the overspending of the division's budget. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette regarding the budget shortfalls, the university determined that the requested record was exempt because it was an employee evaluation and job performance record involving Choate and another university employee. After receiving permission from both employees to release the record, the university provided it to the newspaper.[9]

To satisfy public concerns about the division’s budget shortfalls, Gearhart requested an audit of Advancement finances by the Arkansas Division of Legislative Audit and the University of Arkansas System. The audit report was jointly published on September 11, 2013.[10][11] At the subsequent meeting of the Legislature's auditing committee, a former university employee made allegations that Gearhart had fostered a "culture of secrecy" and directed the destruction of relevant documents.[12] A prosecutor then investigated allegations that the University had violated the Freedom of Information Act (which would be a criminal offense under Arkansas law), but the prosecutor found no evidence of criminal activity.[13] The prosecutor’s review included conflicting testimony from several witnesses, some indicating that Gearhart had told them to "get rid of" a document.[14] However, the prosecutor determined that the document in question was not responsive to any FOIA request and thus had no bearing on the matter at hand.[15]