The college-donor name game

While it may seem like anything goes in the college name game, that's not the case, says John Meyer, Ohio State's director of university development. "We try hard to be careful," he says. "We all know there's a line that mustn't be crossed."

Sheryl Bourgeois, head of development at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., agrees that selling names can be touchy. The university's law school is available to be named for $20 million to $30 million - but not by just anybody. "We would shy away from having our law school named after a law firm, or our school of music after a music company," she says. "We do have a value associated with our name, so we cannot sell out just to get that donation."

Still, for $25,000, there could be an elevator in Chapman's business school with your name on it.

While critics may think the naming trend crass, it's really part of a tradition that goes way back.

American higher education hasn't been the same since British merchant Elihu Yale gave bales of cotton, books, textiles, and other goods worth about £562 ($800) to the Collegiate School at Saybrook, Conn., in about 1718.

Since then, naming has become critical higher-education finance - and was key in the great fund-raising decade of the 1990s.

Between 1995 and 2000, donations to higher education by alumni - about 30 percent of overall giving - rose 89 percent to $6.8 billion from $3.6 billion, according to the Council for Aid to Education.

"This idea of going public with names connects to ego on one hand, and also to the idea of reinventing oneself, which is very American," says Joseph Boskin, professor emeritus of American social history at Boston University. "What the universities are doing is flexible capitalism. [They're] offering a way of becoming immortal."

And there are still some great bargains. At Washington and Jefferson College in Washington, Pa. you can name a brick fence post outside the newly renovated stadium for $10,000. Or, for $25,000, you can have a plaque in the laundry room.

But for the budget-minded, Cottey College, a two-year school for women in Nevada, Mo., has a better deal. Five hundred dollars will get your name on an adjustable piano bench, and a bit more will buy a label on a microscope or lab table.

One Cottey dorm even boasts the "Gladys Earnest" memorial automatic door opener, whose benefactor donated $10,000.

"Kings immortalized themselves with pyramids," Dr. Boskin says. "It's now possible to immortalize a family name by having a bench, or a sliding door, or a revolving door. It puts it more in the reach of Everyman. It's the democratizing of immortality."

Send e-mail to claytonm@csps.com.

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