As an undergrad at the University of Chicago, you quickly get a sense of the weightiness of the economics department. In part, that’s due to its students’ half-joking reputation for career-mindedness among their more eclectic peers. But a bigger reason is the fact that UChicago economists — Milton Friedman and George Stigler among them — promulgated a school of economic thought that’s revered and reviled worldwide for its free-market precepts.
In 2017, students at the school got another association to add to the list. That was the year billionaire hedge fund manager Kenneth Griffin gave the university $125 million, specifically to support its famous economics department. Griffin’s gift came with a condition: The department would be renamed the Kenneth C. Griffin Department of Economics, a name it retains today.
Though that gift came after my time at the university, one can imagine the vague and lofty regard attached to the name of Griffin by successive students, most of whom will have little interest in the man or his philanthropy, but cannot help but ascribe some resonance to a name that so blatantly adorns their school’s most well-known academic department.
Griffin seems intent on continuing that tradition. This week, his alma mater Harvard University announced a new gift of $300 million to support the school’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The donation, described in the glowing terms we’ve come to expect from university administrators, comes with another name change — Harvard’s graduate school of arts and sciences will now be known as the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
This isn’t very surprising. Griffin, who founded and runs Citadel LLC and commands a fortune of around $35 billion, has a fondness for big, splashy donations to big institutions. In 2014, for instance, he directed $150 million to Harvard to back its financial aid program, and he’s well-known in his longtime home base of Chicago for grand gestures like a $125 million gift to the Museum of Natural History in 2019. His lifetime giving sits north of $1 billion, a large portion of which has gone to Harvard.
Name changes tend to follow in the wake of Griffin’s largesse. And he has little issue with the publicity. In 2019, he framed his rationale this way: “With literally no exception, every institution I’ve supported wants [a name and amount attached]. They want the idea that there’s public validation, and then there’s a number associated with [the gift] that helps to drive other contributors.”
Griffin and his alma mater are no doubt enthused with this latest gift, but it has met a colder reception from other quarters. “They’ve engaged in a transaction — gift for name — and one in which the name itself doesn’t connote a clear value associated [with the] institution,” wrote Ben Soskis, philanthropy scholar and senior research associate at the Urban Institute, on Twitter.
The transactional nature of the gift is one of many things we might find fault with. Others will no doubt point out the fact that Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, very much doesn’t need the money, and that Griffin, with tens of billions of his own, very much doesn’t need the tax write-off. One might also wonder whether this really is, as Harvard President Larry Bacow put it, “exceptional generosity,” considering it barely puts a dent in Griffin’s enormous fortune.
Some might also take issue with Griffin’s politics, which are now hitched to Harvard by association, for better or worse. Not only has he been an unabashed advocate of the low-tax, low-regulation worldview — see his gift to UChicago’s econ department — he’s also backed that up with vast political support for the GOP to the tune of over $71 million during the 2022 election cycle alone. As with other Republican mega-donors, this ties him, albeit indirectly at times, to some of the modern GOP’s worst tendencies. The higher ed mega-donor has also given money to Florida governor and education censorship crusader Ron DeSantis.
Still, we shouldn’t pick on Griffin too much. Apart from the sheer size of his gifts, he’s hardly an outlier. Major gifts to “eds and meds,” including those conferring naming rights, are such a staple of philanthropic giving that we’ve become all but numb to the fact that you can’t walk several yards through a university campus without encountering the name of some donor or other.
“The charitable landscape is now extravagantly, even profligately, marked by the names of wealthy donors,” wrote Soskis in a 2021 piece on the many issues with naming rights. “These names likely help reel hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of additional dollars into the coffers of charitable institutions. But they also represent a problem, a cacophony of signifiers of wealth and privilege introduced to and cluttering the public square.”
As an extension of that, consider also the effect of this cacophony on students. Sure, most will take for granted all the named classroom buildings, residence halls, libraries, research labs, dining halls, athletics facilities, admin buildings, and on and on. But are we confident we understand the full psychological and societal impact of four-plus years spent among all these signs and signifiers?
Have we considered, for instance, how this flurry of naming puts wealthy businessmen up on a (sometimes literal) pedestal for young people during an especially formative time in their lives? Do we understand how it affects female students — who make up the majority of college graduates in the U.S. today — to see the names of women, when they show up in this context at all, most often appearing as someone’s wife? And what of students of color, surrounded by paeans to predominantly white donors?
At elite institutions especially, many of these students will go on to positions of leadership and influence. And so while the very wealthy have every right to offer major gifts, and schools have every right to accept and applaud them, naming rights in particular should provoke more circumspection than they do from institutions whose stated purpose it is to shape well-rounded thinkers and leaders.
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