Opinion: Is Tulane Ignoring a Donor’s Wishes?

Even as a Louisiana appeals court today hears arguments in the dispute over a 137-year-old donation used to establish Tulane’s Newcomb College, Naomi Schaefer Riley, in an opinion article in The Wall Street Journal, wonders whether the donor’s wishes had long been ignored.

Originally established as a women’s college within Tulane, Newcomb College was downgraded as part of the university’s post-Katrina restructuring to an “institute” that does not confer degrees and has no dean and no student body.

The college’s namesake and benefactor, Josephine Newcomb, stipulated when she made the $3.6-million donation in 1870 ($75-million in today’s dollars) that the college should operate independently from the university and focus on providing a liberal-arts education for women and that “the education given shall look to the practical side of life as well as to literary excellence,” according to a statement Ms. Newcomb made when she donated the money.

But well before 2005, writes Ms. Riley, Newcomb had slid far from the donor’s intended purpose.

Ms. Riley says such lack of attention to a donor’s desires are common and that “all of this misspending might make people on both sides of the political spectrum think twice about giving away money.”

“True, determining a donor’s intent is not always easy,” she writes. “ When the children of donors are alive, they can generally be reliable stewards of their parents’ money. But after that, who knows? When several decades have passed, circumstances may make it difficult to imagine what a donor would have wanted. In those cases, the courts will have to make a determination.”

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