I am not a socialist who wants to tax these ultra rich guys to their last penny. It is their hard earned money and they deserve to do whatever they want.
Still it is the hard fact that most of these ultra rich tend to donate their money in very small chunk of their fortune. Steve Schwarzman made the headline by donating $188 million to Oxford for study of humanities. But that donation is just slightly more than 1% of his net worth. On top of that last year he made between $568 to $786 million from his investment in Blackrock.
The real truth is that many of these ultra rich can donate one half of their net worth to charity and they will still have more than enough money to last a few lifetimes. A guy with a $200,000 net worth may have to completely change his life style if his net worth goes down to $100,000. OTOH, a plutocrat with $20 billion net worth losing half of his fortune hardly has to line up for Social Security.
@Hebegebe Absolutely agree. If I had the fortune of Gates, Bezos or WB and I want desperately for people to remember my legacy, then I would not have a second thought forking over $10 billion to change the U of C or UPenn name. Heck, I would even do so if I “only” had the lesser fortune of Bloomberg or Ellison.
The intriguing question is whether either school would accept money from, say, a Jack Ma or Li Ka-shing or Amancio Ortega. Or even a Bernard Arnault for that matter. Interesting thought experiment: Slim University of Chicago and Ambani UPenn
It’s hardly just Chicago and Penn. There are “elite universities” all over the world with geographic names. $10B might induce any number of them to add a name or two. Not to mention the reasonably elite universities in Cambridge MA (the other elite university in Cambridge MA) and Pasadena CA.
$10 bil. is still a lot of money. It’s a helluva lot for an unconditional “legacy” honor. Benefactors rarely make their offers w/o adding further conditions. Sometimes those conditions would work for the institution, sometimes they wouldn’t. The larger the institution, the more complicated the whole process gets. That may be why benefactors now seem to be more into schools and divisions, rather than entire universities. Easier to exert control/influence when there are only a few moving parts, rather than many (some of which might be at odds with one another).
Someone with $10 bil. might be more likely to found his/her own institution, rather than deal with an existing one.
Well, we all know that the University of Chicago could have been named Rockefeller University given its founding benefactor. But that didn’t happen, and Rockefeller University was founded separately later. It has an endowment of over $2B, putting it right around #50 nationwide, with its peers being Boston University, Carnegie-Mellon, Swarthmore, and Wellesley.
Yet Rockefeller University is barely known. The point is that reputations take time to build, and money alone doesn’t guarantee it.
ETA: Yes, I do know that Rockefeller University is only a graduate school for biomed, and is well known there in that specialized area. I should have been more explicit about the difficulty of creating a nationally known university strong in all areas.
^ Sure, but that’s always the risk. A major benefactor might be able to start with a couple of divisions or even a specialized institution (say, devoted to the social sciences as that doesn’t require a whole lot of plant). With enough money, those guys would go for it, assuming enough stars were involved. They’d bring their grad students with them.
These are giddy thoughts about what could be done with all that dough, but the name of this place is somehow bound up with its ethos. The identification of the great city and its great University would be broken if it forever bore the name of a mere plutocrat. And we would be deprived of just a bit of our claim to be a plain democratic alternative in a glitzy brand-obsessed America. Let lesser schools flaunt the names of their rascally founders. We here in Hyde Park, in the great city of the heartland - “that somber city” of Saul Bellow’s depiction - take our coloration from the place itself and are accordingly solemn, severe, gritty, anonymous, and underappreciated. Don’t ruin all that anti-glory with a slick new name!
@hebegebe at #27: agree that it’s harder as you say to build up a nationally-ranked university than it would be a highly-regarded specialized institute, but it’s also possible to add to the various divisions over time. It’s a trade off because simply attaching your name to a fully-grown university just seems much easier, but for many benefactors there’s going to be a lot more to it than just forking over the dough and watching your legacy take root.
The point I was making earlier is that benefactors can place very high demands on a university for the amount offered and that doing so might cause the leadership to balk even if the price otherwise seems right. The issue with the Koch’s donations to GMU and FSU are case in point, because they apparently were able to purchase influence over faculty hiring and firing decisions and that revelation was a horrible embarrassment for those institutions and damaged their respective reputations. It’s also a nightmarish situation for faculty - including top faculty - who prize academic freedom over sizable donations. And its not just an issue with the Koch’s - any typical uber-rich self-made donor is going to try to meddle to some degree over and above what a donation typically grants them (such as a seat on the board). They are going to have ideas and visions that worked for their business and (they believe) might work with academia as well . . . and some of these might come in direct conflict with academic independence or the university’s ability to run itself autonomously with input from all the board (not just a key few). So it’s a bit of a tightrope because clearly the leadership of any university is chasing funding in order to meet its own goals, but in doing so they can’t cede control over what made them great in the first place or cause upheaval among their prized faculty.
It’d be great to have no selfish motive other than being the name attached to a great legacy, but it doesn’t always work that way.
Remember that the fellow who donated $100 million twelve years ago to establish the Odyssey Scholarships has always remained anonymous, has not meddled, and is known only as Homer. That’s my kind of plutocrat.
"These are giddy thoughts about what could be done with all that dough, but the name of this place is somehow bound up with its ethos. The identification of the great city and its great University would be broken if it forever bore the name of a mere plutocrat. "
Or worse. Imagine if your alma mater had been renamed "Epstein U" :blush: At this point even Harvard might have to call it a day with that particular benefactor.
I expect that in the case of Epstein, Weinstein, etc, there would be a morality clause that could take reverse the name change. Doesn’t eliminate the damage, but lessens it.
Maybe it was a morality clause that kept Mr. Rockefeller’s name off the University of Chicago! --That’s a joke, but, seriously, how could there be a greater benefactor of the University of Chicago than its founder? Another name tacked on a century and a quarter later would have written all over it “Presumptuous Egomaniac! Usurper!” No, just as Yankee Stadium is the House that Ruth Built, the University of Chicago is the School that Rockefeller Built.
If you want to achieve some measure of immortality by associating your name with academic and research excellence, you could do it far more efficiently than by buying the naming rights of a great university for $10 billion. Alfred Nobel, Cecil Rhodes, John and Catherine MacArthur, Jack Kent Cooke, and even Bill Gates have gotten a lot of mileage out of endowing scholarships and prizes.
Have any of your read “Titan,” the biography by Ron Chernoff on John D. Rockefeller.
It goes into detail on why John D. didn’t want his name on the University of Chicago. If I remember correctly, the relationship wasn’t as cozy as we seem to intimate. In fact his hand picked President, really took advantage of John D. to the point where he was about to pull out of the relationship. John Jr. was actually more friendly to UChicago than dad was. It is also an interesting story how he even ended up in the relationship. If you haven’t read the book, it is a great and fascinating story that includes a large section on his philanthropy which includes UChicago and Rockefeller U.
Other cool things that I didn’t know. MOMA is on the land that once was John D.'s home in NYC.
All aspects of his life were fascinating to me. How he got to his role. The birth of Standard Oil. The juggernaught that became Standard Oil. The fight with the US Government. His key lieutenants and the intrigue. How he got into philanthropy. His religious life. And his later years. But probably of even more entertainment value is the life of his father and his father’s impact (mostly bad) on John D.'s life.
