Donor Intent Endangered

Campus Report ^ | November 6, 2007 | Malcolm Kline

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Donor Intent Endangered

by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 06, 2007

Usually, when you donate to a charity you have some say in what happens to the donation, at least if you’re still around when the transfer payment takes place. “If ye’ be living when you’re giving, you be knowing where it’s going,” noted philanthropist John Templeton notably said.

The problem of donor intent has become so acute in the charity world that it has spawned a cottage industry that focuses attention on it and, to some degree, has made charities more meticulous in adhering to their mission statements. Conversely, in the academic world, the subversion of grants and gifts remains a problem, even when the benefactors are alive and kicking.

We have written of the plight of the Flatley family who endowed a theology chair at Boston College that a vaguely heretical Jesuit now occupies. Now, no less a tough guy with a bulldog-like reputation for tenacity than syndicated columnist Robert Novak may be watching the original intention of his endowment going awry.

“I did not know whether the University of Illinois wanted a chair endowed by a right wing columnist to study the works of dead white men,” Novak wrote in his memoirs. “After all, Princeton had recently spurned such a bequest from a much more prestigious alumna than I.”