It’s not uncommon for university boosters to donate money or property to the alma mater. It would be wrong to assume that the schools always honor the donors’ wishes. Recently, I talked with George Leef, director of research for the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, about the problem of recipients diverting funds to uses the donor wouldn’t approve of. You can find the entire Q&A here, but here’s a sample.
Martinez: You mentioned earlier Henry Ford and the Ford Foundation. I think everyone, no matter how little we might be involved in philanthropy personally, has heard of the Ford Foundation. What was it that Henry Ford wanted done, and what happened?
Leef: Well, the Ford Foundation was taken over by philanthropy professionals who had very left-wing ideas about how Ford Foundation resources ought to be used. Henry Ford didn’t like any of them, but when he approached his attorney in about the mid-1930s, I believe, and asked, “Can we get out of this, can we undo this somehow?” he was told, “Sorry, too late. You can’t.”
Martinez: Oh, my gosh. That would be so discouraging. You think you’re doing one thing …
Leef: It would be discouraging, and that’s the message of the paper [by Martin Morse Wooster]. If you want to endow a chair, for example, you’ve got to be very careful because you might get someone in that chair teaching beliefs that you find abhorrent, eventually. But, unless you’re really, really careful, that can happen.
Martinez: So what is the cautionary tale here, not only for very wealthy donors, but for those of us who may make much smaller donations but want to make sure that we’re giving this money for a specific purpose?
Leef: Well, it’s not easy to do. If you just write a check to the university’s general fund, well, they’ll use that according to their own purposes, of course. Even if you have enough money — let’s say $1 million — to set up an endowed chair, those don’t always turn out very well. In fact, Martin gives us a funny case involving the [late] columnist Robert Novak, who thought he was setting up a chair to support the teaching of Western civilization at the University of Illinois. The person who wound up in that chair, you might think, has his own version of what’s important in Western civilization. One of his books is on the importance of comic books. Well, [that’s] probably not what Novak had in mind.
