To give is to gain a heap of grief if you’re a mega-rich donor these days.
In recent months, a hedge fund billionaire was denounced for his $400 million gift to the already wealthy Harvard University, David Geffen took flak for gifts that plaster his name on a Manhattan concert hall and a Los Angeles school, and the wife of a Wall Street banker was roasted for trying to put her name on a small Adirondacks college. Even Bill Gates, who has given billions to battle diseases, is taking lumps in a new book titled “No Such Thing as a Free Gift.”
Scorn for the rich and powerful dates at least to the Gilded Age heyday of Rockefeller and Carnegie, but experts who track philanthropy say the spate of indignation this year is not surprising when even academics and presidential candidates rail against the privileges of the so-called 1 percent.
“We’ve always had this very mixed attitude toward very wealthy people giving their money away,” said Leslie Lenkowsky, an Indiana University professor who studies philanthropy. “It’s a long, drawn-out controversy. Our concerns about equality and inequality are bringing it back to the surface today.”
Critiques vary, but they tend to revolve around allegations of vanity for seeking credit, futility for giving to less-deserving beneficiaries or simply acting like an arrogant rich person.
Media mogul Geffen, a prolific philanthropist for the arts, AIDS and other causes, has been accused of a bit of each after two recent gifts, including $100 million this month to create the Geffen Academy at UCLA to serve the children of faculty, among others. The gift — aimed in part at attracting top talent to the college and its medical school, which is named for Geffen — has generated critical headlines like this one in L.A. Weekly: “Let’s All Watch David Geffen Light His Money on Fire.”
Placing a rich person’s name on a building in return for a big donation is an established practice in the philanthropy playbook that can be a way to honor a loved one or encourage other donations. While mocked recently as “Philanthro-me” and “Egonomics” by social commentators, money-for-naming transactions can be mutually beneficial. Benefactors get their name in history books — or at least on Google Maps — and recipients get cash infusions for pressing projects.
For instance, New York’s Lincoln Center received $100 million toward massive renovations for Avery Fisher Hall from Geffen in a deal that renamed the venue to David Geffen Hall this month. But that happened only after Lincoln Center paid $15 million to the family of Fisher, a philanthropist who died in 1994, to clear the way to the renaming.
Geffen’s gift was lauded as transformative by Lincoln Center administrators and elsewhere criticized as self-aggrandizing. But the reaction was muted compared with the buzz saw started this summer by Joan Weill, the wife of billionaire former Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill.
She offered $20 million to Paul Smith’s College in New York’s Adirondacks — but only if the small college changed its name to Joan Weill-Paul Smith’s College. Outraged alumni cried foul. The deal was likened to bribery and a betrayal of the college’s history.
A court eventually ruled that the bequest that established the college barred the name change. Weill chose not to give the $20 million.
“There’s an unease about the charitable world,” Lenkowsky said.
