This dissertation is a study of university fund-raising in Romania. It examines the fund-raising activities at four state and private universities and highlights both the successes and the less successful attempts to expand their funding base. The study reveals that universities' leaders and staff are rarely aware of and tend to underestimate the scale and scope of fund-raising activities at their institution. It also reveals interesting situations of private capitalism in public universities and shows that while there is individual fund-raising the institutions are not always able to capture it. I argue that the university's capacity to fund-raise is limited by both internal and external factors. Among the external factors the limited degree of autonomy for state universities and the legal framework for personal and company giving are the most restricting. The internal factors include the governance structure and the university fragmentation (particularly at state universities), the lack of fund-raising capacity and the organizational cultures. The thesis also discusses the concept of unethical entrepreneurial ism to describe practices and activities that help generate income but are not within the generally accepted range of entrepreneurial behavior. The study also discusses the degree of isomorphism in the Romanian higher education sector and shows that universities are not as isomorphic as has been thought before.