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April 22, 2008

Naming Rights Spur Controversy at Yale U.

Should Yale University name a college after its chief investment officer?

Usually such naming rights are reserved for donors of large sums. And a group of alumni believe that Yale’s investment manager, has indirectly donated millions of dollars —- by earning a far smaller salary at Yale than he could command on Wall Street.

According to an article in The Yale Daily News, a group of anonymous alumni are pushing Yale to name a college after David Swensen, who as the institution’s investment manager for 23 years has helped increase its endowment from $1.3-billion to $22.5-billion.

In a full-page advertisement in the newspaper, the alumni suggest that Mr.
Swensen has sacrificed a $100-million Wall Street salary to work for Yale.

But Robert Frank, author of The Wall Street Journal’s The Wealth Report,
balks at giving the financial guru naming rights.

“Maybe Mr. Swensen could make $100-million a year, maybe not. But measuring
someone’s contribution based on their theoretical salary in another job is
misleading. It’s like saying Hank Paulson [former head of Goldman Sachs who
now leads the U.S. Treasury Department] should have a federal building named
after him because he’s giving up millions (or billions) he could be making
in the private sector,” writes Mr. Frank.

Do you think Yale should name a college after Mr. Swensen? If not, how
should a nonprofit group honor a successful financial manager?

— Ian Wilhelm

Tuesday April 22, 2008 | Permalink

Comments

1. My institution is named after a past president, and there are named memorials for other past presidents, trustees, deans, and professors. I think it’s altogether appropriate for a college to honor a financial manager if the institution thinks that individual made an equally substantive contribution. Clearly the institution gives up the ability to have someone pay for the naming rights of that particular college, but is any institution lacking for things to be named?

   — chronanon    Apr 22, 09:54 AM    #

2. It seems … unseemly to name a new college after someone who’s alive and still in Yale’s employ. What if (God forbid!) he turns crooked next year and embezzles a fortune from the school? What if he has to resign in a cloud of controversy over a sex scandal or something like that? Do they sandblast his name off the wall and change everyone’s intramural T-shirts?

   It would be safer to wait and honor him at the end of his tenure at Yale, when the sum total of his contribution is known.

   (Not to cast aspersions. I have no reason to believe that he’s not a righteous, upstanding man who wouldn’t think of either embezzling or harassing. I’m just throwing out some hypotheticals.)

   In the meantime, an appropriate honor for Swensen might be a scholarship/fellowship in the economics department or at SOM — something to benefit someone studying in the field in which Swensen has excelled. That would be easy enough to re-name/remove if necessary.

   As an alum, I’d like to see the new college(s) named for prominent female graduates. We’ve got 12 white male names carved over the gates … can we get at least one woman up there?

   — mccxxiii    Apr 22, 10:09 AM    #

3. Maybe Yale should wait to see what effect that mortgage crisis will have on their investment portfolio before they get too dreamy and arrogant but money that is not… not… not real

   — t    Apr 22, 10:27 AM    #

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