In Memoriam: Thomas P. Nickell Jr., 88

May 29, 2009 7:45 AM

Thomas P. Nickell Jr., former USC vice president for university affairs, died in San Diego on May 25. He was 88.

Nickell directed fund raising, public relations and alumni affairs at USC over the course of more than three decades. During his tenure, alumni volunteers and friends of the university worked under his direction to garner more than $500 million in private support for USC. He also was a driving force in the formation of the university’s premier academic support group, the USC Associates, established in 1959.

“Working with USC President Norman H. Topping, Tom Nickell was instrumental in bringing USC into modern times in terms of college and university fund raising,” said Senior Vice President Emeritus Roger F. Olson, who worked with Nickell for more than two decades.

A native of Richmond, Ind., Nickell spent two years as an economics major at Butler University before enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1942. After three years of distinguished service in the South Pacific, he was discharged in 1945 at the conclusion of World War II.

In February 1946, Nickell joined the flood of former GIs entering USC where, as a student, he was a member of Skull and Dagger as well as the honorary national advertising fraternity Alpha Delta Sigma. He received a bachelor of science in marketing and advertising in 1948.

After graduation, Nickell worked for two years as assistant director of advertising and public relations at Occidental Life Insurance Co.

He returned to his alma mater in 1950, when Arnold Eddy, then director of the General Alumni Association, and John E. Fields, USC’s first vice president for development, hired him to direct the university’s annual giving program.

In this role, Nickell was instrumental in helping the university’s professional schools more effectively involve their alumni in raising funds. He developed the concept of support groups, originally organized on the basis of members contributing $100 per year in unrestricted support for their respective schools. The first such group was the USC School of Dentistry’s Century Club, founded in 1956. Today, every school at the university has at least one dedicated support group.

Nickell was named director of fund raising and development in 1957, director of university planning in 1960 and vice president for university planning in 1961.

As a newly appointed vice president, he helped steer USC’s first major institutional fund-raising campaign, the Master Plan for Enterprise and Excellence in Education. Announced by USC President Norman H. Topping in May 1961, the $106,675,000 drive was expected to last two decades but surpassed its goal in five years.

Writing in Southern California and Its University: A History of USC 1880-1964 (published in 1969), authors Manuel P. Servín and Iris Higbie Wilson predicted that Nickell “was to become one of the nation’s outstanding, if not the most productive, money raisers in American collegiate circles.”

Under Topping’s successor, John R. Hubbard, Nickell helped lead a second successful fund-raising effort, the Toward Century II campaign, which brought in $309 million to USC during one of the country’s most severe recessions.

Nickell left USC in 1981 to operate the Nickell Co., a development consultant to clients such as the University of Washington, the National Gallery and the Armand Hammer College of the American West.

From Rancho Santa Fe, where he maintained his home for nearly three decades, Nickell served on the boards of the Scripps Foundation for Medicine and Science; the Shiley Eye Institute of the University of California, San Diego; American Medical International; Republic Savings and Loan; RFS Mortgage Co.; Republic Mortgage; Green Cancer Center; and Scripps Clinic.

In 1987, he received the Butler Award, the highest honor conferred by the Butler University Alumni Association. He also was awarded honorary degrees from Pepperdine University and Upper Iowa University.

Nickell is survived by his wife, Toni Woodward Nickell, five children from an earlier marriage and seven grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 11 a.m. on June 24 in the Varsity Lounge of Heritage Hall on the University Park campus.

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