The Gifts You Don't Take

Having never been a dean or a development officer, I've never been confronted with questions about donors offering gifts with questionable conditions attached or grants being offered by government departments with whose mission the school may ideologically disagree.  My question is:  Are there limits/conditions/subject matter concerns that go with a gift that would justify a school not taking it?  As our new dean says, "all money is green", but is some of that money ever too tainted by conditions or comprises to accept it?

My con law prof always used to give the example of whether the government could ever legislate that "all blue eyed babies must be killed".    But he always pointed out that it was an easy argument because the example was just too fanciful.

Applying this to gift giving, the analog might be the offer of a gift on condition that the faculty would never accept applications from minority students.  Presumably a school would never take such a gift - and it would be illegal anyway.  But does anyone have any real life examples of gifts that a school didn't accept or almost didn't accept or renegotiated before accepting on ideological grounds?

Comments

[Joe]

My wife is a humanities prof at a non-research I institution. It's private, with a decent-to-good overall regional reputation, several professional schools with reputations ranging from mediocre to very good (and the law school about in the middle of that range), lots of MA/Ms programs with OK reputations, and a handful of PhD programs with mediocre to above average reputations. Point is, it's not Wisconsin, but it's not DeVry, either.

Anyway, she teaches in a department that, until recently, was sort of considered a joke at the school -- people were getting tenure with three or four articles (and most of those non-peer reviewed), no one ever published anything after tenure, lots of faculty infighting, etc. That's all changed in the past 5-10 years as the horrid humanities academic market has allowed the school to pick up superstar entry level candidates. (My wife, for example, has published or placed five articles -- including in the top three journals of her field -- in a handful of years and is currently undergoing a bidding war between the top two presses for her book, though that just means she may be able to avoid subvention.)

Well, right when she got here, a private donor offered the department about $3M to establish a named chair and develop a then-undeveloped specialty. The catch? A non-tenure track lecturer without a PhD, who was friends with the donor, needed to be appointed to that named chair-ship for at least three years. There was much consternation among the administration about what to do with that. I think they even offered to take less if they could be allowed to go after outside lateral hires that would be more suitable for a chair. No dice -- the donor wanted to "reward" his/her friend. The school ended up accepting the $$$.

[Matt]

The Philosophy department at McGill University turned down $1.8 Million that was to fund a chair to study Ayn Rand's philosophy. The official reason was that chairs are perpetual and this was too narrow a focus for a chair. That's plausible, but I'm sure it wasn't the only reason.

When I was in grad school, the fellowship I had was officially funded by the donor to provide for the graduate education of a "gentile male". While I am in fact a "gentile male" I was assured that neither the university nor the department makes any effort to make the wishes of the now dead donor effective. I would like to think that they'd turn down such a donation if it were offered today, though I don't know.

[anon]

Relating to the last comment, cy pres can make the worst gifts turn good. It's the less despicable but still unfortunate gifts (maybe the Rand chair is among them) that are hard to shake.

[bob strassfeld]

Jacqui,

There has been a recent controversy at FSU because the Koch Foundation gave money for the university to hire two economists but conditioned the grant on having a veto over the choice of hires. As I recall, FSU took the money.

There is also someone out there, I forget who it is, who has been funding ethics courses at universities but insisting that the curriculum must include Ayn Rand.

Years ago the Marcos family, back when Imelda was collecting shoes and Ferdinand was collecting political prisoners, made a gift commitment to Tufts University. Again, the university said thank you kindly, but protesters so offended the Marcos' that they ultimately renegged on their pledge. I think there has been similar problems someplaces, but not others, regarding money from the Saudi Royal family.

Jack Getman published a delightful piece in the Journal of Legal Education a few years ago entitled "The Mussolini Chair." It explores what a law school might do if given a pot of money on the condition that it name a chair for Mussolini and create a special library collection of the writings of Benito Mussolini.

I'm not sure what limits your new dean, and mine, might have in mind when he said that all money is green. All diamonds sparkle, also, but I hope we would pay attention to their provenance before accepting such a gift from, say, Charles Taylor.

There is an old Chad Mitchell Trio song which includes the line "Once rockets go up who cares where they come down. That's not my department, says Werner von Braun." The blind acceptance of any and all donations presents two problems for an institution, I think. First, in some instances unsavory folks may be trying to buy respectability. They see the tie to a university as reputation cleansing (whether or not this achieves it's goal is another issue). But the reputational tie goes both ways. Second, and more threateningly, donors do not necessarily have the same academic values, especially a commitment to free and open scholarship and teaching, that universities must have. When universities sacrifice academic freedom for the sake of filthy lucre, they have sold their values and undermine their mission.

[Mike Madison]

"Wernher von Braun" was by Tom Lehrer, whose academic status makes the reference that much more appropriate.

[Bob Strassfeld]

Mike,

My mistake. You are right.

Bob

[Jonathan H. Adler]

I think the only real question is whether a grant would require a university to do something that, but for the grant, would not be worth doing at all. So it's not a problem if a gift requires research in a given area or putting on a particular type of program unless the research or program is not among those things that would be done were there no resource constraints. Conditions or limitations, in and of themselves, are not problematic unless they cross this line.

Inside Higher Ed did a good write-up on the FSU controversy and the conclusions of the internal FSU review that was conducted after the controversy. The bottom line was that there was no undue influence, but there were some potentially questionable terms in the grant conditions that could have been problematic if exercised.
http://m.insidehighered.com/layout/set/dialog/news/2011/07/18/florida_state_releases_report_on_its_agreement_with_koch_foundation

The funder who requires that Ayn Rand be assigned in funded programs is John Allison, the former CEO of BB&T. I believe most of the programs he funds are in econ departments or business schools, not philosophy departments.

As for the source of the money, I would not worry too much about this save in the most extreme circumstances. In principle, I'm not sure why it's bad to relieve a bad person of their money so that it can be put to good use. The only exceptions I think I would make would be if I believed either a) the money was obtained illegitimately, e.g. through criminal conduct, or b) accepting the money would cause such controversy that it could harm the school. But these need to be narrow exceptions. Let's face it. Any prominent law school will have lots of alums who have earned their money doing all sorts of things some of us may or may not approve of.

JHA

[Jacqui Lipton]

So there do seem to be one or two apocryphal examples out there, but not that many. When I was a faculty member at an Aussie law school, one of the major banks gave a large gift to cover the establishment of a banking law center and associated programming. At the time, gift-giving was not a particularly big thing in Australia and this was the first major gift and the first academic center for that law school. Some people were initially concerned about the "corporate sponsorship" of what was basically a government-funded public institution. However, our experience with the bank was terrific for students and faculty alike (to the best of my knowledge) and the donor certainly never used the center or the funding to push any particular agenda.

[Matt Lister]

The McGill/Ayn Rand case isn't Apocryphal. You can find the details easily enough on-line, and I read about it in the Chronicle of Higher Education when it had just happened.

[Jacqui Lipton]

You're right, Matt. That was a poor choice of words on my part. I was just trying to convey that there weren't too many real life stories of worrisome gifts, not that the stories were of questionable validity. It's a Friday night and I'm tired, but that's no excuse for a lawyer using poor word choices!

[Robert Strassfeld]

I'm not sure that the response here is sufficient evidence that there aren't many real life stories. Rather, I think all we can say is that a relatively small group of scholars, many of whom may be ghettoized in law schools and may not know much about what is going on in other parts of their university or in other parts of the wider realm of academia can only scare up a few examples.

There are other examples, and, if I weren't limited to the few books that I have handy, I'm sure that I could come up with others.
For example, in the 1950s and early 1960s the Michigan State University Group, made up primarily of faculty from the school's police studies program, but also from political science, economics, and other departments, entered into a contract with the United States government and the Diem government in South Vietnam, to provide advice and training to various agencies of the South Vietnamese government. In time, they also served as a funnel of material support for the Diem regime. Setting aside the obviously troubling results of what was in its inception arguably an idealistic effort to help get a democratic government up and running in South Vietnam as the work of the MSUG was grossly misapplied by the Diem regime and its repressive police forces (think strategic hamlets and tiger cages), the relationship came to create problems for Michigan State, as well. As more and more of the police studies faculty were deployed to Vietnam, the university needed to find bodies to staff their courses in East Lansing. Many of their hires were questionably qualified (if I remember correctly, they were not put on the tenure track) and were CIA plants. Further, as faculty members involved in the program began to sour on the Diem regime and published articles that criticized the regime, Diem threatened to end the program. Michigan State's President promised Diem that he would screen deployed faculty in the future to make sure that no one sent would criticize the regime.

In 1982, Monsanto gave Washington University $23.5 to fund medical research. The terms of the agreement with the university not only gave Monsanto intellectual property rights to exploit the research, it also gave the company the right to suppress any research that might prove harmful to Monsanto's interests or that might reveal discoveries that Monsanto wished to sit on. Obviously, this flies in the face of the usual expectation that scientific researchers will make the results of their research available to the scientific community (see Jon Weiner, Professors, Politics, and Pop p.88).


The record of much of academia during the McCarthy era is also relevant, though the typical scenario in those cases involved not universities accepting money with strings attached, but rather universities tossing members of their faculty under the bus for a variety of reasons that included the anticommunism of university administrators, but also included university responses to threats made by donors to stop giving to their alma mater if it didn't purge those who had incurred the wrath of congressional investigations (or parallel state investigations). Ellen Schrecker documents this history in her book No Ivory Tower. The example of Yale Law School may be known to some of you. Counterattack, a right-wing journal that outed communists and their "fellow travelers" ran a two-part series entitled "Who are the Men who Teach Law at Yale." The journal identified six faculty members, none of whom had belonged to the communist party. They had, however, supported various liberal organizations in the 1930s and 1940s and were guilty of being anti-anti-communist. Several of them, as I recall were members of the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, and/or the ACLU. Some had represented communists or accused communists. Most prominent among the six was Thomas Emerson, a leading scholar of civil liberties, and someone who had represented communists. According to Schrecker mail poured into the law school threatening to withold donations if Emerson wasn't fired or disciplined. Five of the six identified faculty members were tenured and remained unscathed. The remaining one, Vern Countryman, was a young bankruptcy scholar with a promising future, who was unanimously recommended by the law school for tenure and a full professorship. Yale's President, however, decided to put off tenure, first, under the cover that Yale was about to undergo a dean change and should wait until the new dean, Harry Shulman began his tenure. Once Shulman became Dean they denied Countryman's promotion and tenure on the grounds that his scholarship, while promising, was not yet up to snuff, notwithstanding the unanimous recommendation for his tenure. Countryman then left Yale for the law firm Shea and Gardner (shout out to Shea & Gardner). He eventually returned to the legal academy as a tenured professor at Harvard.

Again, if I had lots of time and the right books, I'm sure I could stack more examples on these. All the same, I'm sure that these are aberrations, not the norm. I assume that most donors do not try to interfere with what are appropriately matters for the shared governance of faculty and administration. There is a big difference between saying I'm interested in funding a chair in transportation law or in intellectual property law, or I'm interested in funding a chair in 18th century French history, something that a donor ought to be able to do, and in a donor saying that I'm interested in funding a chair and you must fill it with a member of ACS or you must fill it with a member of the Federalist Society, or that the French History chair must go to Francois Furet or one of his students and not to Albert Soboul or one of his students. I'm sure that sometimes donors attempt to overstep, and I am hopeful that university presidents and deans then diplomatically explain to them why they would love to name a chair for the donor, but cannot accept some of the donor's conditions. That is what we pay them the big bucks for--well one of the things they get paid big bucks for. Moreover, I'm sure that we almost never hear about those instances. I do fear that with the increasing corporatization of the university, and with the right's vision of universities as captured by the left--as well as their dedication to producing a cadre of right leaning scholars, this may increasingly become a problem. I do not mean to suggest that this would be ok if the left did this, but most of the money is on the right these days.