Donor Intent Endangered

Usually, when you donate to a charity you have some say in what happens to the donation, at least if you’re still around when the transfer payment takes place. “If ye’ be living when you’re giving, you be knowing where it’s going,” noted philanthropist John Templeton notably said.

The problem of donor intent has become so acute in the charity world that it has spawned a cottage industry that focuses attention on it and, to some degree, has made charities more meticulous in adhering to their mission statements. Conversely, in the academic world, the subversion of grants and gifts remains a problem, even when the benefactors are alive and kicking.

We have written of the plight of the Flatley family who endowed a theology chair at Boston College that a vaguely heretical Jesuit now occupies. Now, no less a tough guy with a bulldog-like reputation for tenacity than syndicated columnist Robert Novak may be watching the original intention of his endowment going awry.

“I did not know whether the University of Illinois wanted a chair endowed by a right wing columnist to study the works of dead white men,” Novak wrote in his memoirs. “After all, Princeton had recently spurned such a bequest from a much more prestigious alumna than I.”

He generously established the Robert D. Novak Chair of Western Civilization and Culture at his alma mater—the University of Illinois at Urbana and Champaign. “Finally, conservative friends to whom I revealed my intentions told me I was taking a terrible risk with a left-wing public university,” Novak writes in his autobiography The Prince of Darkness. “Surely, after I was dead and perhaps even while I was alive, these skeptics warned, my chair would be filled by an exponent of racial and gender diversity.”

These warnings could yet prove to be prescient. “It is desired and expected that the holder of the Chair shall contribute directly to academic work in his or her academic discipline and to the broader goals for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences as it relates to sustaining understanding of the central values and teachings of Western civilization and culture,” Novak’s original chair description read. “These values and traditions concern the great themes of individualism and human dignity, the primacy of freedom, equality, liberty and democratic choice in political life; the rights of individuals to hold and create property as foundational to economic life; the centrality of personal expression and an unfettered press in a free society; the openness of inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge as goods in themselves; the enduring significance of Judeo-Christian concepts and religious practices; and the importance of personal relationships and the family as the foundational elements of social life.”

Novak describes the first occupant of the chair as “Jon Solomon, a renowned classicist.” Indeed he is but Solomon is also very proud of the book that he wrote about The Three Stooges.
Closer to home, and to his field, two years ago, Solomon participated in a UI conference on “The Oedipus Myth and Its Interpretation.” “Although you need to read a lot of materials for this class, they are not that difficult if you are interested in learning Greek mythology,” one of his admiring reviewers wrote on ratemyprofessor.com.

“Hilarious, tons of pop culture references in every class,” wrote another admirer.
For example, an enthusiastic student wrote, “He is always making jokes (‘Terence is like South Park’), and if you come to lectures, he gives you the answers to pop quizzes.” Another admirer wrote, “I learned a lot of cool trivia in this class.”

Still, while it may not be classics-qua-classics, Solomon might well have been the best that the UI had to offer. Moreover, while Oedipus and The Three Stooges sounds like an odd updating of one of the comic trio’s cinematic classics, you could argue that Oedipus, Moe, Larry, Curley, Shemp and Curley Joe meet the scholarship test with greater ease than the average panel at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention.

And the Stooges’ dialogue is soitenly much more literate, comprehensible and even grammatical than much of what you are likely to hear at the MLA. Novak sees the chair that bears his name as “a perpetual contribution that will outlive me and anything I have written.”

He deserves at least that much.

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.