Welcome to The Donors Club

By Jesse Birnbaum

When a wealthy man insists on flogging his fortune at his fellows, it is not nice to refuse. For example, it would be exceedingly rude for Americans to deny a billionaire simply because he wants to buy the presidency for $100 million and occupy what would thenceforth be known as the Ross Perot Memorial White House.

The trustees of sleepy little Glassboro State College in southern New Jersey are certainly not rude. Overwhelmed by a munificent $100 million pledge from a local businessman named Henry Rowan, the trustees last week not only voted to take the money but, in an expression of gratitude bordering on the fulsome, also decided to rename the school Rowan College of New Jersey. A self-effacing manufacturer of industrial furnaces who attended Williams College and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rowan declared himself flattered by the gesture. He had not asked for the name change; it was simply their way of saying thanks.

Coincidentally, last week another sleepy little institution, Harvard Law School, displayed good manners by accepting a somewhat less spectacular but still welcome $3 million from alumnus Reginald F. Lewis, boss of the biggest black-owned business in the U.S. -- the food conglomerate TLC Beatrice International Inc. Even though the gift is the largest individual donation to the law school ever, there was no rush to dub the place the Reginald F. Lewis School of Law (not for $3 million, anyway); instead, the school's international law center will be named in his honor.

These donations were a decided blessing, especially at a time when colleges everywhere are hungering for money and government support is drying up. As a result, fund raisers have been compelled more and more to rely on big-bucks givers like Robert W. Woodruff -- former Coca-Cola chairman, whose $105 million gift to Georgia's Emory University in 1979 stands as the biggest single donation to any private college (Rowan's is the largest gift to a public college) -- or Stanford University alums David Packard and his wife Lucile, who gave their school $70 million in 1986 for a children's medical center.

But it is one thing to give a philanthropist a building and quite something else to give him a whole college. The Rowan gift in fact did not gladden everybody at Glassboro. At least one alumnus has threatened to go to court, charging that the trustees, in a fit of non campus mentis, have simply sold the college to Rowan. That complaint may not be fair, but it does raise the question of what it takes to buy into an institution of learning nowadays. If Glassboro can be bought, as it were, for $100 million, you can probably get Yale for $109 million.

Schools were cheaper in the old days. In 1639 a Puritan preacher gave half his estate and $400 worth of books to a nameless nine-student school; the place was named for the donor: John Harvard.

No one person can buy a great university, of course, but a few paltry million can get you some little pieces. Bill Cosby and his wife Camille donated $20 million to Atlanta's Spelman College, a private liberal arts school for black women; most of the money was allocated to the Camille Olivia Hanks Cosby Academic Center. In 1985 the W.M. Keck Foundation gave $70 million to Caltech, which now has a telescope called Keck I and, for $72 million more, will soon have Keck II. Publishing magnate Walter Annenberg has the University of Pennsylvania School for Communication named after him ($75 million), though what he got for his generous $50 million gift to the United Negro College Fund was a very nice quilt.

Even a piece of college furniture has a price tag, for folks with big hearts but small bank accounts. A check for $10,000 will buy a carrel in the refurbished University of California, Berkeley, law library at Boalt Hall, which will open in 1994. A Princeton University giver can get his or her name engraved on the back of a chapel pew for $5,000. At Spelman, $10,000 to $15,000 will pay for a decorative fountain. The University of Houston's College of Optometry sells cushioned seats and desks at $300 a pop for its continuing-education courses.

Fifteen hundred dollars will buy a teakwood bench for the Sarah P. Duke Gardens at Duke University. If a donor cannot afford the million dollars to endow an academic chair, it is conceivable that some college somewhere will give him a cafeteria chair for a few bucks.

What bothers colleges most is prospective givers who make impossible demands. Donors have been known to lobby for a spot for a son on the university football team in exchange for a contribution. Not long ago, a wealthy man offered the University of Miami a mere $2 million in exchange for a new building to be named for him, a lifetime appointment to the faculty and regular round-trip airfares to Miami. The university declined.

To be sure, Henry Rowan has stipulations too. He wants the college to build an engineering school and to guarantee free tuition to the children of his company's employees. It will not be difficult to honor those requests at Rowan College.

With reporting by Elizabeth Rudulph/New York and Lisa H. Towle/Raleigh