For most of us, college donations entail little more than occasionally dropping a small check in the mail after receiving repeated pleas for cash from our alma maters. Some people, though, tend to be a bit more individualistic with their generosity. Let’s take a look at some of the quirkier donations schools have received:
1. Bequest Puts Jocks on the Ropes
In 1907, fledgling Swarthmore College received a bequest that was estimated to be worth somewhere between $1 and $3 million. If the school wanted the cash, though, it would have to stop participating in intercollegiate sports. Swarthmore badly needed the cash—its entire endowment was only in the $1 million range—but in the end, the school turned down the gift and the sports survived.
2. Ivy League Has to Produce Homemakers
When former Massachusetts Attorney General A.E. Pillsbury gave Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia $25,000 apiece in his 1931 will, he had a catch in mind: the schools had to use the bequests to combat the feminist movement that had “already begun to impair the family as the basis of civilization and its advance.” Pillsbury envisioned the schools creating a lectureship that could help keep women in the home.
3. Donor Wants Flowers in Perpetuity
For years, Indiana University offered a scholarship with a strange condition: the recipient was supposed to drive from Bloomington to Indianapolis once a year to put flowers on the donor’s grave. The school gradually decided it was a bit much to ask a student to take a roadtrip to a stranger’s headstone, though, so for 20 years it didn’t enforce the requirement. Eventually the donor’s attorney found out that the flowers weren’t being placed, but instead of being indignant he worked with the school to remove the clause from the bequest.
4. Auburn Goes to the Dogs
When Miss Eleanor Elizabeth Ritchey, granddaughter of the founder of the Quaker State Oil Refining Company, died in 1968, she left Auburn University a generous gift of $2.5 million. She also gave the school something a bit more unusual: the responsibility for 150 dogs. Ritchey, who owned a ranch in Florida and loved to adopt homeless dogs, made the large cash donation contingent on the school finding good homes for all 150 of her dogs. The cash was then earmarked for veterinary research.
5. Mystery Donor Opens a Giant Wallet
In 2009, colleges experienced an unprecedented rash of anonymous generosity. Colleges of all sizes around the country received letters from lawyers informing them of seven-figure anonymous donations. The only catch was that the donor wished to stay anonymous, and in some cases the giver required that the colleges sign a contract agreeing not to investigate the benefactor’s identity. The donations, which ranged from $1 million all the way up to $10 million all went to schools that had female heads. Beyond that, though, the donor’s identity and motives remained a mystery, even though he or she donated over $70 million.
6. Bryn Mawr Goes on the Clock
Did Bryn Mawr need any new clocks in 1957? It didn’t matter. They were getting one. Philadelphia physician Florence Chapman Child left the school $50,000 in her will if they would also agree to take her 150-year-old grandfather clock. The doctor stipulated that the school’s administrators had to “install it in an appropriate place, keep it in proper condition and repair, make no changes in the fundamental appearance, and are not to have it electrified.”
7. Small Potatoes Lead to Big Cash
In 1950, the government had a surplus of potatoes and started looking for ways to get rid of the excess tubers. The Department of Agriculture decided to give the potatoes to Hiwassee College, a small Methodist school in eastern Tennessee. College president D.R. Youell told the government that he didn’t want its charity, though. A short time later, the school received a $10,000 donation with a note praising the institution for taking a stand against “the dangerous trends toward socialism in our Government.”
8. Three Colleges’ Ship Comes In
In 2006, famed shipbuilder and philanthropist Luther Blount was feeling generous, and he decided to stick with what he knew when making his donation. He gave Rhode Island College, the Wentworth Institute of Technology, and Roger Williams University a ship to share. The 175-foot cruise ship, The Niagara Prince, was part of one of Blount’s cruise lines. The idea was that the three schools—all of which had given Blount an honorary doctorate—would sell the boat and divvy up the proceeds.
9. Colleges Find a Fountainhead of Cash
In 2008, Marshall University received a $1 million gift to establish the BB&T Center for the Advancement of American Capitalism. The catch was that the school had to agree to teach Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as part of its curriculum. BB&T executives said the requirement was designed to spark debate on the ethical underpinnings of capitalism.
This wasn’t the first time BB&T had made this sort of gift, either. In 2005, it gave the University of North Carolina Charlotte another million big ones to make Atlas Shrugged required reading for its students.
10. College Profits From a Racist Will
When Dr. Jesse C. Coggins died in 1962, he left his estate to the Keswick nursing home so it could construct a new building. Coggins made a last-minute change to the will, though, that stipulated that the building would only house white patients. In 1999, a court ruled that the racist stipulation effectively voided the gift and gave the entire estate—which had grown to $28.8 million—to the will’s backup beneficiary, the University of Maryland Medical Center.
11. Donor Affects Fashion from Beyond the Grave
Radcliffe once received a piece of jewelry as a bequest. A nice gift, to be sure, but the late donor was a bit bossy. She wasn’t just donating the piece of jewelry; she stipulated in the gift that the president of Radcliffe must wear the accessory.
12. Small College Enters the Scientific Instrument Business
By the time Erick O. Schonstedt died in 1993, he had built his 40-year-old business, the Schonstedt Instrument Company, into a $6-million-a-year enterprise. There was a problem, though. If he wanted to leave the business to a relative or an employee, the estate taxes would have been nearly $3 million. None of his prospective heirs had that sort of loot on hand. Schonstedt, a Univeristy of Minnesota alum, got creative. He gave the company to Augustana College, a school that, like Schonstedt, had Swedish Lutheran affiliations.
Rather than simply turning around and flipping the business for cash, though, Augustana decided to run it. The school instituted new sales models, found cost savings, and changed the company’s product mix, and after two years was exceeding profit targets by 25%.
In 2008, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at North Carolina State received a similar gift; a donor left the school controlling interest in a company he had started to raise sturgeon for caviar in North Carolina.
13. A Different Kind of Monument
Back in 2008, Katie Kelly covered an interesting donation here on mental_floss:
“Endowing a school, building, or even a classroom with one’s name is a pretty typical fundraising practice among universities today. Demanding a bathroom to commemorate yourself isn’t quite as commonplace. Brad Feld, a local venture capitalist, donated $25,000 to the University of Colorado on the condition that a plaque would be placed on the door of a second-floor men’s restroom in one of the campus’ technology centers. He originally made the conditional offer to his alma mater, MIT, but was rejected. Feld, in an interview with Boulder’s Daily Camera, stated: ‘I just wanted a plaque outside of the men’s room to inspire people as they walk in to do their business.’ Quite fittingly, the quote reads, ‘The best ideas often come at inconvenient times—don’t ever close your mind to them.’
14. School Doesn’t Say “Danke Schoen” to Wayne Newton
In 1993, Wayne Newton made his first appearance in Branson, MO. He offered to give his cut of the first night’s show to the nearby Presbyterian school College of the Ozarks. It was a pretty generous gift; Newton’s take would have ended up being $15,000 to $25,000.
Unfortunately, the school’s president, Jerry Davis, went to see Newton’s set. He was horrified by Newton’s double entendres and jokes about the elderly having sex. The next day Davis announced that the school wouldn’t accept a cent of Newton’s money.
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Funny coda to the Swarthmore story (I’m an alumnus). Swarthmore now has an endowment of over $1 billion, I believe, which puts it near the top of all colleges and universities in terms of endowment dollars per student.
Much of the success goes to fellow alumnus Jerome Kohlberg (much richer than I), who advised Swarthmore to get out of stocks just before the 1987 crash.
posted by Ben on 2-9-2010 at 11:19 am
Two words: Jeremy Bentham. Should’ve been #1.
posted by Dave on 2-9-2010 at 11:35 am
I thought #3 about the perpetual flowers was going to be Vassar, my alma mater.
There’s an endowment to cultivate and protect a beautiful planting of tulips at the Main Gate. They bloom every year, and someone’s earmarked money to keep it happening.
The consensus is that they’re pretty, but an endowment for them is kind of goofy. Reading this list helps with perspective, though.
posted by Elizabeth W on 2-9-2010 at 12:21 pm
Tufts received a monument to promote anti gravity research. I could never find it when I was an undergraduate there but it is now used as part of the doctorate awards ceremony for a degree in Cosmology, (the candidate kneels in front of the monument and the head of the school drops an apple on his head)
Look up Babson and Anti-gravity. Other colleges received a monument and money
posted by Chris on 2-9-2010 at 12:26 pm
I kinda feel bad for the Indiana University Donor. It just flowers. I don’t know how long that trip is, but for free tuition, I would do it! And as long as the student knows ahead of time that this is a requirement for their scholarship, then I think they should have continued that. I am also upset that the estate attorney decided to have that provision removed from the person’s will. Maybe they had that provision added because they had no family and just wanted to know they would be honored once they passed on. If I was that donor, I would start haunting the lawyer. . .
posted by Mavis on 2-9-2010 at 12:49 pm
My alma matter is Howard Stern’s alma matter. There were always stories about how he promised millions of dollars to the College of Communications (at Boston University) if they would either name the place after him or build a statue of him on the front lawn.
I’m pretty sure these were just the university version of an urban legend and weren’t actually true… but they did make for amusing stories.
posted by Susanna on 2-9-2010 at 1:13 pm
As a student at College of the Ozarks, I feel like I have to defend Dr. Davis’ decision to not accept the donation. C of O operates tuition free – there’s even a write-up on it in another article on mental-floss – and the school can do so only by accepting donations. Now, if Dr. Davis had accepted Newton’s donation, he would have angered a lot of the school’s other, very conservative donors, effectively putting C of O into a bit of a financial spot. He didn’t reject the donation because he was ungrateful for it; he rejected it to avoid alienating other donors.
posted by C of O Senior on 2-9-2010 at 2:26 pm
I’m with Mavis on #3. I bet that person’s spinning in their unvisited grave. Even if it’s not a full scholarship how much would you charge to visit a grave every year? Even if the recipient of the scholarship doesn’t then a representative of the school or of the lawyer’s should. Shame on her lawyer and the school both!
posted by Angela on 2-9-2010 at 2:30 pm
Mavis I was thinking the same thing.
At very least the school should be taking care of the flowers on the students behalf.
Or get creative with the idea and set up some form of field trip or a fund raiser, or something, I’m to tired to think of something right now but some should have a good idea.
posted by hockey zombie on 2-9-2010 at 2:34 pm
I can’t agree more with the posts on #3. First of all the school shouldn’t have had to enforce it, if so they need to find some better people to award it to. If someone is paying your tuition and you can’t bother to take a few hours out of your entire year to honor their request and bring them flowers, that is truly pathetic. In fact, they are stealing from the donor by not honoring their side of the agreement. And what a terrible lawyer to sell out his client like that!
posted by Chris on 2-9-2010 at 3:13 pm
about #3,
Is it so hard to set up an FTD or Tele-Floral delivery once a yr? For $20-$40 dollars you could set up a nice floral display, and that’s not too much out of even a modest $1,000 scholarship to net $980-$960.
posted by Big Jonny on 2-9-2010 at 3:37 pm
Chris, the anti gravity stone at Tufts has found a place of prominence by the the library roof. But I read something that said in the past people used to steal it and bury it places, and they actually lost it for a while! That might be why you couldn’t find it..
posted by Lily on 2-9-2010 at 6:18 pm
You should do a contest and have people come up with their own college donations/bequeaths and weird strings attached.
posted by Sarah in CA on 2-9-2010 at 7:53 pm
Regarding my alma mater, the W. K. Kellogg Foundation gave some land with some strings attached…
“Later in 1949, title to the then 813-acre (3.3 km2) ranch and horses was passed to the State of California, with the provision that the herd of Arabian horses must be maintained. The ranch became part of the Voorhis unit of what was then known as the California State Polytechnic College in San Luis Obispo. This became known as the Kellogg campus, and in 1966 it separated to form California State Polytechnic College Pomona (now California State Polytechnic University, Pomona)”
posted by Steve on 2-9-2010 at 8:15 pm
CofO needs too loosen up–I’m just sayin’ Class of ’04.
posted by trsndrwd on 2-10-2010 at 12:32 am
I thought there was something about a land endowment at Auburn with the stipulation that there be no sorority “houses”, that they could only be housed in the dorms.
posted by Mike on 2-10-2010 at 3:12 am
@Mike
The sorority house thing is fairly common from other schools I’ve spoken to (from sorority conferences, etc) – it’s an old law that states something like ‘more than four unrelated women living in a house together constitutes a brothel’, thus why most schools have Frat houses but not Sorority. I’m not sure how that law effects houses, but not dorms, but that’s a major reason behind that.
And I agree with the comments on #3 – I hate the idea of people not being grateful for what they have…I’ll bring flowers and eat a damn picnic lunch at the grave site if that’s what the donor wanted!
posted by OkieMelissa on 2-10-2010 at 11:01 am
Didn’t PT Barnum donate the stuffed Jumbo the elephant to Tufts? suprised you guys missed this one
posted by j on 2-10-2010 at 11:53 pm
As a recent graduate of College of the Ozarks (like, eight weeks ago recent), I’d like to point out that CofO is officially non-denominational. It was Presbyterian when it was founded, but that changed a couple decades ago, at least.
And as C of O Senior pointed out, the college does operate on donations. No student pays tuition, and the college receives no federal funding. Unfortunately, that means sometimes they jump through hoops to keep the donors happy. The vast majority of donors are 70+, traditional WASP types who appreciate the hard work ethic the school instills. The risk of losing out on potentially $100,000 or more meant that it wasn’t worth taking Newton’s donation.
Although, if you want an interesting donation, some of the interesting donations CofO received were a collection of orchids and the money to build a grist mill. The mill, Edwards Mill, is in full operating condition and routinely grinds flour, corn meal, etc. It’s also home to basket weaving and loom weaving, which means that now they get donations of looms (although the weaving studio in the mill has as many looms as it can handle, as does the weaving studio in the art department, and there are many looms in storage now). I spent two summers working there, it’s a cool place.
ReCaptcha: “had nosegay.” How sad.
posted by Kate on 2-11-2010 at 11:11 am
I’m from Indiana – Indianapolis and Bloomington are only about 50 miles apart, an hour drive or so. I don’t think it’s too much to ask at all, for the recipient to drive that distance to put flowers on the grave of the donor. I’d be happy to do it for a scholarship! I agree with the above comments, it’s awful that they had that stipulation removed. Who wouldn’t want to thank the donor, even in death, for helping them to fund their education? A simple request really.
posted by Nicole on 2-13-2010 at 11:42 am
Several years ago the University of North Dakota received a huge doation from one Ralph Englestadt to build the hockey team (winners of about 8 NCAA titles) a new arena. The stipulations:
1. Name it after him (it is)
2. Fill it to overflowing with images of the school’s mascot (it is)
3. Never EVER change the school’s mascot or the donation will be cancelled.
The problem? The University of North Dakota’s mascot is the Fighting Sioux, which the NCAA has become more and more vocal in recent years about the school changing the mascot to something a little less racially insensitive. The Lakota tribes in the area are all in favor of a change as well.
[I am not a UND alum and if there are any who wish to add to or correct my tale, please do.]
posted by eric! on 2-14-2010 at 1:51 pm
I’ve decided that, if I ever have a bunch of money to spare, I’m going to start a college scholarship called the Sandy Awesome Fund. I will invite high school seniors to write a short essay detailing why they are awesome and they deserve my money. I don’t want generic, boring answers like that they’re good at soccer or they work 20 hours a week at the local coffee shop. Nope. I want essays that convince me that they are funny and awesome.
The top three essay writers will be invited to my house individually, along with their favorite parent or guardian, for an informal lunch interview thingy. After meeting with each one personally, I’ll decide who gets the Sandy Awesome Scholarship.
I realize that, in order to make this successful, I’ll have to offer a decent sum of money. After all, I doubt many kids would bend over backwards to write an essay for a scholarship whose recipient is so subjective.
posted by Sandy on 2-14-2010 at 3:34 pm
I’ve offered my alma mater, the University of Delaware, billions of dollars in Monopoly money. They have yet to return my calls.
posted by Victor @ I Complain Therefore I Am on 2-14-2010 at 10:20 pm
I would like to join the rising chorus of those disappointed by #3. Sounds like a whole bunch of ingrates should have been forced to rescind their free money! And that attorney should probably be reprimanded. Shameful on all accounts.
posted by Roger on 3-11-2010 at 1:00 pm
Regarding #3:
A quick google maps search says that Bloomington is about 90 minutes from Indianapolis…That’s not asking a lot.
posted by Jeremy on 5-5-2010 at 12:31 pm
I had once heard that the reason that the main campus of NC State has so many buildings and walkways made of red brick was because a bricklaying company founded by an alumni donates several tons of brick each year.
supposedly why the Brickyard is so large.
but I am not totally sure that this is 100% true, so don’t quote me on that.
posted by Kirkland on 8-20-2010 at 10:18 am
At Carleton College, a longtime employee named Dacie Moses donated her house with the request that it always be open to students 24/7, and that cookies be available for students at any time.
posted by Julia on 10-29-2010 at 1:45 pm
I’m with Dave on Jeremy Bentham – the ‘auto-icon’ bit would be enough for #1 even without public dissection.
posted by Laura on 10-29-2010 at 5:31 pm
I was intrigued by the story about Hiwassee College and the government potatoes; however, I can’t find any information about this anywhere on the internet other than reprints of this article, not even on the school’s actual website. It’s an interesting anecdote, but I’d like to hear more of the story.
posted by Dorkus on 1-30-2011 at 8:19 pm
Dorkus — I’m emailing you a NY Times article from 1950. Check your inbox in a few!
posted by Jason English on 1-30-2011 at 8:52 pm
Agree with everyone on #3. That person is funding your education and you can’t be bothered driving to put some flower on their graves. I’m in agreement that whoever made the bequest start haunting some people!
posted by Bianca on 8-31-2011 at 7:53 am
Bates College in Maine got donated a hockey rink with slightly smaller dimensions than NCAA specs on the condition the playing dimensions couldn’t be modified. Thus assuring Bates could not have a D-3 hockey program.
posted by Cory on 8-31-2011 at 8:13 am
I’m agreeing with most on #3, but I did go through college without a car which would have made this difficult. However, if I had been the recipient, I probably would have ordered flowers online and had them sent (then maybe visited the grave whenever I found myself in the capital?). I hope the scholarship still mentions the now optional tradition so that perhaps it could continue.
posted by Cat on 8-31-2011 at 8:51 am
I’ll join the chorus of boos regarding number three. The point was that the donor have someone actually think about him or her once- just once- a year. If you can’t drive… Call 1-800-flowers. They deliver.
posted by Christine on 9-5-2011 at 12:25 am
The nursing home story is incorrect. The courts eventually decided that the home would receive the money, but the gift would be administered as if the racist clause was not in the will.
posted by unrest on 11-4-2011 at 10:26 pm
This guy’s gifts have got to be the best, though they aren’t quite the same as the list, with its money-with-strings-attached emphasis.
Love the Babson Gravity Stones. Had one at my alma mater, and always thought it was a great little inside joke, since nobody ever paid it much attention. Great to show to freshmen or prospective students… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_Research_Foundation#Monuments
posted by Josh S on 11-23-2011 at 10:46 pm