Today’s Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece discussing the tendency among wealthy alums to donate large sums to colleges other than their alma maters.
I knew a man (now deceased) from St. Louis who had graduated from Princeton, but wouldn’t give Princeton a dime due to what he regarded as its proclivity for squandering money on nutty professors like Peter Singer. Instead, he put a lot of his money into endowing the Hayek Chair at University of Missouri/St. Louis (now held by the estimable Larry White).
Searching for small schools with small resources but good programs rather than automatically donating to increase the endowments of already-rich institutions makes perfectly good sense. Apropos of yesterday’s Shaftesbury, I would suggest that High Point University would be an excellent place for a wealthy philanthropist to put some of his money.
