A University of New Hampshire professor has started an online petition asking UNH President Mark Huddleston to reconsider how the school spent a multimillion-dollar donation from a former librarian.
After UNH announced that it would spend a quarter of a $4 million bequest left to the school by former Dimond Library cataloguer Robert Morin on a video scoreboard for its newly renovated Wildcat Stadium, the backlash was swift and fierce – and picked up by national news outlets.
Some faculty members thought the use of Morin’s gift made sense, but basically all were humiliated by the bad publicity the story earned the school, said UNH art history professor Patricia Emison.
Her Change.org petition asks Huddleston to put the librarian’s gift to better use by “strengthening the academic core mission of the University, whether by helping the underfunded library or by establishing scholarships for liberal arts students or by some combination of causes that center on enhancing undergraduate education.”
The school has, since the announcement, doubled down on its decision, initially saying that Morin had come to love football in the final months of his life and that the scoreboard was an important way to attract potential students.
But weeks after it initially fielded questions and criticism about Morin’s gift, school officials have offered a new defense: that the scoreboard was actually the smartest way to invest in student aid.
“Although we’re still working out the details, we’re confident that advertising revenue from the videoboard will be able to provide more scholarship dollars than an endowment would have,” UNH spokeswoman Erika Mantz wrote in an email Monday.
UNH has calculated that, had it invested $1 million in a scholarship endowment fund, the annual return would only be about $40,000. Annual advertising revenue from the board will far exceed that figure, officials argue, and could be put toward scholarships.
Mantz could not say Monday exactly how much the school expected to commit to student aid from the board’s advertising revenue, reiterating that “we expect it to be more than the $40,000 a year generated from a $1 million endowment but at this time details are still being worked out.”
The controversy has been a lightning rod for complaints about New Hampshire’s highest-in-the-nation tuition rates for in-state students.
“I have struggled to complete my undergraduate degree at UNH because I barely receive financial aid and the university refuses to help me stay in school,” wrote one student who signed Emison’s petition, Jacqueline Gilbert – who added that despite being an “A” student, she now lives temporarily in a friend’s room and is unable to buy groceries.
But Emison’s first priority would be see more of the donation diverted back to the library, where Morin, a UNH alumnus and English major, worked his entire life.
As the faculty senate library committee chairwoman, Emison wrote to Huddleston in late September urging him to put some of Morin’s gift toward updating the library’s off-site storage facility, which is “distressingly below standard and the collection at risk from mold.”
And while the scoreboard has received the most attention, Emison said she also takes issue with the school spending $2.5 million from Morin’s gift on renovating its student career center.
While she was “certainly not against helping our students find jobs,” Emison said she didn’t believe a multimillion-dollar renovation to a career center would be the most efficient way to do it.
Ultimately, Emison said she hopes the school will at least decide to send $400,000 back to the library – the amount it still hadn’t decided how to use after the scoreboard, career center expansion and $100,000 donation to the Dimond Library (the only explicit request tied to Morin’s gift).
“I know I’m a booklover,” she said. “But it seems to me that acquiring books for a university library is a basic function of what a university should do, and that taking care of them equally so.”
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)
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