Pearsons, Who Pledged $100M to UChicago, Want Their Money Back
chicagomaroon.com
chicagomaroon.com
> Apart from ensuring that the Institute had a world-class in-house faculty, the contract also mandated that the University host an annual “Pearson Global Forum” (PGF) that would convene leading conflict scholars and policymakers from around the world.
> The University, according to the suit, was obligated to hold the first PGF by October 31, 2018, but said that it could not host the event by then as “it had not planned or done the necessary preparatory work.” The Pearsons alleged that the University informed them that it would attempt to meet this obligation by that date by instead involving the Institute in the 2018 Irish Catholic Bishops’ World Meeting of Families Congress, an event which, according to its website, “brings together families from across the world to celebrate, pray and reflect upon the central importance of marriage and the family as the cornerstone of our lives, of society and of the Church.”
The university thought it was getting a donation, along with some vanity conditions, comparable to naming a building or a chair, which it could fudge while spending the money on whatever it wanted.
The foundation thought it was paying the university to carry out something very specific on its behalf.
I think it's clear that the conditions were more than vanity, and were actually qualitative.
I'm sure more will come out - this will be an interesting lawsuit.
"Relying on a university administration is generally not prudent. It is clear that the Family envisioned an effective "new business," in the spirit of a venture or a "start-up" and those kinds of projects take serious business execution. In my experience, the Pearson's complaint merely exposes the tip of the iceberg as far as what the donor "sausage machine" looks like in a major university. Lesson? Donors need to act more like active investors, despite the general hard resistance universities put up."
They were expecting university administrators to provide "serious business execution".
> A few days before Robinson’s appointment as institute director, the University also announced that two scholars, an associate professor at Columbia University and an assistant professor at New York University, would assume named full professorships at the Pearson Institute.
> “For the other two chaired positions, the U of C hired two junior, non-tenured professors from academic institutions that are ranked below the U of C in national academic standings,” the complaint reads.
Putting aside the difficulty of rating universities by any objective metric, when did UChicago become more highly ranked than NYU and Columbia? I'm surprised about both, but I'm rather shocked about Columbia. According to US News and World Report[1], UChicago is in a two-way tie for third place among all universities in the US. I'm aware it's a good school, but I didn't realize it's "officially" beating out Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, CalTech and every Ivy except for Harvard and Princeton.
_____________________________
1. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...
http://publicuniversityhonors.com/2015/06/13/u-s-news-nation...
For example, several years ago a couple friends I knew withdrew their undergrad applications to Harvard when they were granted acceptance to uchicago because of the mathematics curriculum (it wasn’t an objective choice necessarily, but it was a well thought out one that was academically motivated).
It was a little odd that its graduate programs were almost universally held at the pinnacle of academics, while most people didn’t think the undergrad was that good. That changed when uchicago accepted the common app (looks more selective) even though the rest didn’t change as much. Suddenly it skyrocketed in the rankings. It was always that good, though.
Most Nobel Prizes (per "unnoficial" counts that have some weird inflation for some universities but not Chicago!):
1. Harvard
2. Columbia
3. Cambridge (UK)
4. Chicago
5. MIT
6. Berkely
7. Oxford (UK)
1. Cambridge (UK)
2. Chicago
As for Chicago -- well, when I asked Irving Kaplansky to volunteer something I might not yet know, he told me the history of the department. That didn't impress me. I eventually picked Harvard over Chicago for several reasons:
-- Chicago had a fixed course curriculum. Harvard had zero actual course requirements. -- Harvard's faculty seemed more approachable by and engaged with the students. -- I was more attracted to Harvard's resources in other departments. (And in fact, I wound up post-doccing at Harvard in public policy.) -- Cambridge was a lot nicer area to live in than the area around University of Chicago.
I made the right choice. But I surely would have been happy with Chicago as well.
No written agreement but he still won a lawsuit and was awarded damages.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/giving/when-a-donation-st...
In case you weren't aware, "Venture Philanthropy" is a real, concrete term used since the 1960's and apropos![0] "Philanthropic VC [Fund]" is an oxymoron, though, I'm sure it's been used jokingly.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/venture-philanthropy.as...
1) Robinson/the institute using its resources to lure two rising stars rather than established names is par for the course (though giving them named professorships so early in their careers is unusual, I think). I doubt the Pearsons are up on how such things typically operate.
2) The number of people who are both "senior scholars studying conflict resolution" and "researchers doing data-driven, rigorous work" might be in the single digits, or an empty set. The people who come to mind are mostly in their 40s, which is mid-career.
3) I personally hope the Pearsons win their lawsuit. First, giving to a wealthy university is really bad from an effective altruism POV, and if this kind of acrimony discourages such donations, and if subsequent substitute donations create higher utility, then that's great. Second, if universities only accept gifts whose conditions they are capable of fulfilling, I would hope for less administrative bloat. Or, just as possibly, the Pearsons' winning won't have the desired effects at all, who can say.
Are the Pearsons notoriously difficult people? Was there a perception or whisper campaign that the institute wouldn't be as academically free or rigorous as advertised? Was Diermeier maneuvering behind the scenes to torpedo the institute? I get the sense that a lot of the story is still hidden.
>The Pearsons are no strangers to lawsuits regarding their philanthropic contributions. In 2011, Thomas Pearson sued Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, his father’s alma mater, alleging that a $1.2 million gift made in their name to the Methodist seminary had been misused. The United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ultimately ruled that the Seminary had respected the terms of the contract and dismissed all of the Pearsons’ claims.
My hunch is that they grossly overestimated what a political science department could do to "reduce conflict around the globe".
But in this case, it is a non profit donating to another non profit institution. So there are no real tax implications anyway.
There are implications. A private foundation has required distributions[0] and this could impact that. My guess is the IRS would be reasonable if this donation was returned, but there could be issues, especially if the foundation had delayed past distributions in order to fund this major project.
[0] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundation...
I don't understand how you can attach strings (i.e. conditions ) on gifts, telling the receipt how they can or cannot use the gift.
> In the suit, the Pearsons declared that they had lost all confidence that the University would be “an appropriate or capable steward of the Pearson Family legacy” as it had allegedly failed to fulfill several key contractual obligations that were agreed upon when the gift was made.
This would be akin to telling my dad that I will gift him a car for his birthday, but on the condition that he can never sell it or rent it out or re-gift it to his friend. If he doesn't do as I say, I'll sue him to get the gift (car) back.
Or is it that corporate gifts are not the same as personal gifts?
[EDIT: What's with the downvotes? I'm not trolling, this is a serious question.]
UChicago didn't have to accept it. They chose to accept it, with the associated terms and conditions. The way the article reads, it looks like there's blame to go around, but possibly more to UChicago than Pearsons.
Normally when you make a tax-deductible charitable gift, the organization you donated to will send you a letter documenting your gift and stating that no goods or services were provided in exchange for the gift:
https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1771.pdf
The IRS might review that documentation as part of a tax audit. If it's inaccurate, it could conceivably affect the tax status of the organization that issued the acknowledgement letter.
The IRS can also revoke the 501(c)(3) designation of an organization if it concludes that the organization is inappropriately providing benefits to its donors. For example, it might require the organization to be reclassified under a different tax-exempt status where donations are not automatically treated as tax-deductible charitable contributions.
A subtle thing that might be bothering you is that people can make extremely specific charitable gifts to pursue extremely specific goals, and those can still be treated as tax-deductible. For example, you could donate to create a scholarship with very detailed eligibility requirements (often, donors to schools have created scholarships for students with very similar life circumstances to the donors' own). But, there is still a requirement that can't claim a deduction for the amount of a donation for which you personally receive goods or services with a market value as a quid pro quo, except to the extent the donation exceeds that market value.
I'm not a lawyer or accountant and this is not tax or legal advice.
When I joined the Bronx Zoo as a member, I gave them $200 and received some benefits in consideration. Those benefits are valued at $140, so I am able to deduct $60 from my income.
This is a first though, I didn't know you could take it back.
If the idea for the Institute had been the universities, and they were soliciting donors to fund it, and Pearson was one of multiple donors, sure that would qualify as a gift, but as the article is written, this was a very different beast.
The second complaint is that the contract stipulated a conference of some sort needed to occur at the institute by October 2018, and the resulting Catholic conference was unsatisfactory to them (it sounds like they disliked the conference's emphasis on heterosexual marriage).
It's hard to tell how reasonable these complaints are from the outside, and how much of it is donors who don't know much about universities trying to micro-manage a gift after the fact. For what it's worth the article claims the Pearsons have lost a similar donation case before.
Had they been more senior professors from lower ranked universities it probably would be close. But being junior AND lower ranked is kind of icing on the cake.
As for the conference, they had a specific mandate and didn't fulfill it. They knew they weren't going to fulfill it so they sent a request to the Pearsons asking if a conference that was already happening would suffice. A conference about hetero marriage which seems to have nothing to do with world peace. So seems like a blatant cop out.
My first thought was that they are just difficult, seeing as they have sued before, but it may just be that they are just vigilant as to how their money is used.
Rankings across every discipline will be different and vary based on the source but that's a decent estimate. The article notes one source has Chicago at #3 and Columbia at #5, with NYU at #30.
No Federal Judge is going to accept the Pearson's argument that Columbia is an obviously far inferior school. This argument would mean that the only acceptable sources of faculty would be Princeton, Harvard, Chicago and Yale (tied for 3rd with Chicago). Maybe they would accept Oxford and Cambridge as additional acceptable sources?
The overall complaint gives the sense that the Pearson's are exacting and highly litigious. Exacting on a $100MM donation is understandable, filing suit this fast is rather absurd. But both sides have lots of money for both academic research and lawyers so it will be entertaining at least.
If you're trying to build a vibrant research institution, one of the best thing you can do is to grab promising young faculty, rather than relying on senior faculty who are harder to recruit. Getting promising junior faculty, and using the institute's resources to position them for success - more hard money, better startup packages, support for staff and postdocs, etc. is absolutely a promising way to build what the Pearsons want.
And within the band of universities we're talking about, the variance between individuals is way bigger than the difference between those institutions based on rank - which is a problematic measure at the best of times.
However, it appears to me that in most academic settings, one does not move up two or three tiers (assistant/associate professorships to chaired professorships, which are the new positions in this case) at once to a peer university at the top level, unless one makes an earth-shattering contribution, say an equivalent of the first successful self-driving car.
Apparently the Pearsons want four faculty members at the chaired professor level at this institute and two of the appointees to chaired professorships, though could be brilliant, do not yet have that level of name recognition in the field.
I believe the Pearsons argument is valid in this case unless the field’s criteria for promotion is very different from science, engineering, and computer science. What do you think?
I've made directed donations before. If I found out that the donation to my school was spent on football helmets instead of the scholarship fund, I'd be very upset.
Just 100% of this. Gift in this case has tax implications, but it in no way implies generosity of spirit, friendship, or the spirit of giving for another’s sake.
If I gift you a new car, but with the caveat that after 5 years, you must donate it to charity, does that make my gift disingenous or not generous?
By this definition, whenever anyone buys anything it is a gift.
Simple, you just attach covenants to the gift. You can do the same with real property (such as during the sale of land), which restricts the ways in which a property can be used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Covenant_(law)
> This would be akin to telling my dad that I will gift him a car for his birthday, but on the condition that he can never sell it or rent it out or re-gift it to his friend. If he doesn't do as I say, I'll sue him to get the gift (car) back.
I think it's more like an agreement that you can use the car as long as you keep your grades up and obey a curfew.
You do it with a contract, the same way you attach conditions on anything else in life. It's the obvious way, and it's done all the time.
There are a lot of specific rules relating to specific contract terms you can or cannot agree to, specific conditions that might make the contract invalid, implicit clauses that may apply even if not explicitly stated, etc., that's not really relevant here. But in general, yes, absolutely, if you and someone else sign a document that says you'll do X, and they have to do Y, and there's no coercion or fraud, and neither X nor Y is something illegal, then yeah, you have to do X, and they have to do Y. It's hardly hyperbole to say our society is built on this notion. And "I give you a bunch of money and you do these specific things" is hardly an exotic form!
> This would be akin to telling my dad that I will gift him a car for his birthday, but on the condition that he can never sell it or rent it out or re-gift it to his friend.
Correct. Which is a thing you could do, and which people actually do all the time, sometimes with just a verbal contract, sometimes with more formal contracts.
What's confusing or surprising about this? It's just how our society (and legal system) work. Why would you think you couldn't do it? Why would you think that people wouldn't do it?