Your money or your name
October 31, 2023 11:07 AM   Subscribe

Have there been cases where an institution eventually erased the name of an objectionable donor (from a building, name of a scholarship etc) and then had to return the donated funds to the canceled philanthropist or their foundation?
posted by ojocaliente to Work & Money (13 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
I think Patrick Radden Keefe’s book on the Sacklers may have an instance of this when Oxycontin suits were at their peak
posted by toodleydoodley at 11:21 AM on October 31, 2023 [6 favorites]


The University of Oregon may have done this with McKenzie (formerly Grayson) Hall.

Grayson, the president of Capital Consultants, donated $800k to the university. According to the linked article:

In 1997, the University named the former law school after Grayson, who promised to donate $1.5 million to the University. Since then, the University has received about $800,000 and remodeled Grayson Hall, while the federal government has shut down Capital Consultants for bilking investors and making bad loans.

I wrote "may" because who knows if the money ever got back to the right people. The name of the building was definitely changed though.
posted by El_Marto at 11:32 AM on October 31, 2023


I’m assuming you mean “had to” return the money in a legal sense rather than a moral sense, like eg the donation included stipulations about the length of time the building would carry the name? It really depends on the nature of each individual donation and the contract negotiations that may have been involved. This is a pretty interesting overview of some of the complexities of these agreements. My understanding is that, more often than not, it’s not as simple as a 1:1 “money for naming rights” thing, and it’s not that common to include a clause about returning the money if the name is removed. The link does mention a case where a specific agreement legally prevents such a name change from happening in the first place, though.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:32 AM on October 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


Aha, this interview mentions at least one such case:

Charities that lose in court may end up paying significant sums to rebrand. An example is Vanderbilt University’s 2002 attempt to rename Confederate Memorial Hall, a building the school had acquired following a merger with George Peabody College for Teachers in 1979.

Peabody had received a donation of $50,000 from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1933 to fund its construction, with the condition that the building carry the moniker in perpetuity. After Vanderbilt publicly announced that it would remove that tribute to the Confederacy from the building’s name and walls, the organization sued to enforce the terms of its gift agreement.

A trial court initially approved Vanderbilt’s cy pres request to rename the building. An appeals court overturned that decision and ordered the university to reimburse the United Daughters of the Confederacy the value of its original donation, adjusted for inflation, in exchange for the right to rename the building.

A decade later, anonymous donors gave Vanderbilt the $1.2 million it took to get rid of what Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos called “a symbol of exclusion, and a divisive contradiction of our hopes and dreams of being a truly great and inclusive university.”


But these days, institutions are much more likely to include expiration dates and various other ass-covering clauses in donation agreements like this.
posted by showbiz_liz at 11:36 AM on October 31, 2023 [9 favorites]


Here's another case where the order was reversed: the promised naming rights were removed for nonpayment. Princeton removes Perelman name on dorm after nonpayment of gift
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 11:44 AM on October 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


Seconding the Sackler Saga.

Also, this one involving the law school at the University of Richmond is a longer arc of history without the refund, but still fascinating.
posted by tafetta, darling! at 12:25 PM on October 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


The City of Buffalo built a baseball stadium, and the rights were sold to "Pilot Air Freight". Pilot Air Freight failed to make all the payments. Pilot Air Freight accused the City of not holding up its end of the deal as well. It was never made clear by Pilot Air Freight what the City was not doing.

No funds were ever returned to Pilot Air Freight.

(From Wikipedia)

The stadium would be named Pilot Field in exchange for the company paying the City of Buffalo $51,000 on an annual basis. Their name was stripped from the venue by the City of Buffalo in March 1995 after Pilot Air Freight defaulted on payments.
posted by Colonel Sun at 12:56 PM on October 31, 2023 [1 favorite]


Recently, in Canada
posted by avocet at 1:33 PM on October 31, 2023


Hastings Law School
posted by SemiSalt at 2:11 PM on October 31, 2023


Pretty sure the solution to renaming Hastings Law School is to research the heck out of the killings and get enough documentation and proof so you can rebrand it as the Hastings Massacre Memorial Law School, and heavily promote the idea that this Massacre Must Not Be Forgotten. Once the name Hastings becomes equated with the massacre you will please everybody!

...Or at least have a fighting chance for the Hastings family politely requesting they will pay you to change the name to something that celebrates the Yumi and doesn't mention their ancestor.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:57 AM on November 1, 2023


In Toronto, a major post-secondary institution was recently renamed to Toronto Metropolitan University based on longtime objections to the fact that namesake Egerton Ryerson founded the residential school system which stole and abused and even killed children from hundreds of Indigenous families.

E.Ryerson had been deceased since the 1880s, so there was no need to return funds to a donor, but the cost was considerable to the school - couldn't find an exact figure but about 6 years prior, a simple change of the font of the school's former logo had cost $200K, so this full name change probably cost in the millions.

Sidebar; it's interesting and informative to observe who in Toronto now calls the school TMU (and before that University X when the name was still being decided) and who persists in using the old name.
posted by nouvelle-personne at 9:56 AM on November 1, 2023 [1 favorite]


There was Jeffery Epstein and the Interlochen Arts Academy- they removed all donor recognition of him in 2008.
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:01 PM on November 1, 2023


Although I doubt they returned the money, so perhaps not the best example?
posted by Larry David Syndrome at 4:14 PM on November 1, 2023


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