TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072092/0720120.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 5.5 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                EDUCATION, Page 72

Welcome to the Donors Club


A businessman pledges a gift of $100 million, and an ecstatic
college offers to change its name to his

By JESSE BIRNBAUM -- With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York
and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh


    When a wealthy man insists on flogging his fortune at his
fellows, it is not nice to refuse. For example, it would be
exceedingly rude for Americans to deny a billionaire simply
because he wants to buy the presidency for $100 million and
occupy what would thenceforth be known as the Ross Perot
Memorial White House.

    The trustees of sleepy little Glassboro State College in
southern New Jersey are certainly not rude. Overwhelmed by a
munificent $100 million pledge from a local businessman named
Henry Rowan, the trustees last week not only voted to take the
money but, in an expression of gratitude bordering on the
fulsome, also decided to rename the school Rowan College of New
Jersey. A self-effacing manufacturer of industrial furnaces who
attended Williams College and graduated from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, Rowan declared himself flattered by the
gesture. He had not asked for the name change; it was simply
their way of saying thanks.

    Coincidentally, last week another sleepy little
institution, Harvard Law School, displayed good manners by
accepting a somewhat less spectacular but still welcome $3
million from alumnus Reginald F. Lewis, boss of the biggest
black-owned business in the U.S. -- the food conglomerate TLC
Beatrice International Inc. Even though the gift is the largest
individual donation to the law school ever, there was no rush
to dub the place the Reginald F. Lewis School of Law (not for
$3 million, anyway); instead, the school's international law
center will be named in his honor.

    These donations were a decided blessing, especially at a
time when colleges everywhere are hungering for money and
government support is drying up. As a result, fund raisers have
been compelled more and more to rely on big-bucks givers like
Robert W. Woodruff -- former Coca-Cola chairman, whose $105
million gift to Georgia's Emory University in 1979 stands as the
biggest single donation to any private college (Rowan's is the
largest gift to a public college) -- or Stanford University
alums David Packard and his wife Lucile, who gave their school
$70 million in 1986 for a children's medical center.

    But it is one thing to give a philanthropist a building
and quite something else to give him a whole college. The Rowan
gift in fact did not gladden everybody at Glassboro. At least
one alumnus has threatened to go to court, charging that the
trustees, in a fit of non campus mentis, have simply sold the
college to Rowan. That complaint may not be fair, but it does
raise the question of what it takes to buy into an institution
of learning nowadays. If Glassboro can be bought, as it were,
for $100 million, you can probably get Yale for $109 million.

    Schools were cheaper in the old days. In 1639 a Puritan
preacher gave half his estate and $400 worth of books to a
nameless nine-student school; the place was named for the donor:
John Harvard.

    No one person can buy a great university, of course, but
a few paltry million can get you some little pieces. Bill Cosby
and his wife Camille donated $20 million to Atlanta's Spelman
College, a private liberal arts school for black women; most of
the money was allocated to the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby
Academic Center. In 1985 the W.M. Keck Foundation gave $70
million to Caltech, which now has a telescope called Keck I and,
for $72 million more, will soon have Keck II. Publishing magnate
Walter Annenberg has the University of Pennsylvania School for
Communication named after him ($75 million), though what he got
for his generous $50 million gift to the United Negro College
Fund was a very nice quilt.

    Even a piece of college furniture has a price tag, for
folks with big hearts but small bank accounts. A check for
$10,000 will buy a carrel in the refurbished University of
California, Berkeley, law library at Boalt Hall, which will open
in 1994. A Princeton University giver can get his or her name
engraved on the back of a chapel pew for $5,000. At Spelman,
$10,000 to $15,000 will pay for a decorative fountain. The
University of Houston's College of Optometry sells cushioned
seats and desks at $300 a pop for its continuing-education
courses.

    Fifteen hundred dollars will buy a teakwood bench for the
Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University. If a donor cannot
afford the million dollars to endow an academic chair, it is
conceivable that some college somewhere will give him a
cafeteria chair for a few bucks.

    What bothers colleges most is prospective givers who make
impossible demands. Donors have been known to lobby for a spot
for a son on the university football team in exchange for a
contribution. Not long ago, a wealthy man offered the University
of Miami a mere $2 million in exchange for a new building to be
named for him, a lifetime appointment to the faculty and regular
round-trip airfares to Miami. The university declined.

    To be sure, Henry Rowan has stipulations too. He wants the
college to build an engineering school and to guarantee free
tuition to the children of his company's employees. It will not
be difficult to honor those requests at Rowan College.