For years, a corps of activists has been pushing to hold the Sackler family accountable for the devastation wrought by the company it owned — and that was the source of the family’s enormous wealth and the taproot of their celebrated philanthropy. Purdue Pharma began manufacturing the painkiller OxyContin in the mid-1990s and peddled the drug so relentlessly that it helped spark the opioid epidemic.
As that culpability has come to light, the company has been the target of numerous lawsuits that seemed to open potential avenues for retribution.
Yet as the legal case against Purdue developed, the activists grew increasingly concerned that it would leave the Sacklers relatively unscathed. Sure enough, when a U.S. bankruptcy judge in September approved a settlement for Purdue, most of those activists expressed deep disappointment. The Sacklers did agree to contribute some $4.5 billion to address the opioid crisis. But by the terms of the settlement, the family would keep the bulk of the fortune they had made from OxyContin, would be shielded from future civil lawsuits, and would admit to no criminal wrongdoing.
Yet there was one provision within the settlement that stood out for its punitive punch. As the New York Times reported, the family “will be forbidden to seek naming rights to places like hospitals and museums until they have paid all their opioid debts and exited their worldwide opioid-related businesses.”
It was an unprecedented extension of the arm of the law into the philanthropic realm. “A family that has destroyed so many lives should not be able to put its name on our trusted institutions,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey explained in a statement.
Even this punch could have been punchier. Notably, the final settlement does not say anything about existing institutions that bear the Sackler name. In fact, according to an individual familiar with the negotiations surrounding the settlement, one proposal discussed but not agreed upon would have prohibited the family from pursuing legal action against any institution that decided to take the name down, as several have recently done.
As this individual notes, the bar on future naming is “symbolically significant but practically less so, in that no institutions were going to be creating new Sackler wings or galleries any time soon anyway.”
But that symbolic significance could itself have real practical consequences. The provision’s inclusion in the settlement represents the clearest and most consequential statement in recent history of the public’s interest in overseeing the honors granted to donors. It invites a wholesale reconsideration of the place of naming rights in contemporary philanthropic culture.
That reconsideration requires coming to terms with the fact that the charitable landscape is now extravagantly, even profligately marked by the names of wealthy donors. These names likely help reel hundreds of millions, possibly billions, of additional dollars into the coffers of charitable institutions.
But they also represent a problem, a cacophony of signifiers of wealth and privilege introduced to and cluttering the public square. We need to ask: What do all these names mean? What do they do? And, depending on those answers, how should we respond to them?
Cynicism, Gratitude, and Values
There are three main ways that the meaning of naming rights can be understood, which in turn shape the way the public is encouraged to regard donors and their gifts.
The first is as the realized term of a contract between donor and beneficiary institution. This transactional view can foster a sort of cynicism; the names etched on walls simply point to the power of the wealthy to impose their preferences and identities on the rest of us — and so instruct us in little more than in the vanity and self-regard of those with lots of money.
Naming rights can also be understood as a private gesture of institutional gratitude. In this case, the name does gesture to some laudatory quality in the donor. But those qualities are often called into being through the act of the gift itself: the generosity and public-spiritedness of the donor need not extend beyond the writing of that one significant check.
And then the act of naming can also be understood as a statement about a charitable institution’s values, and to the extent that the public has a stake in those institutions (whether because they are supported by the public’s tax dollars or because, as Attorney General Healey suggested, they are beneficiaries and custodians of the public’s trust), the public also has a stake in the nature of those names.
Names, after all, can have a lot to say. They can offer legitimacy through an association between the donor and the mission and values of the charitable institution, which extends beyond gratitude for the gift to some deeper judgments. A named institution can both reflect and shape attitudes toward the donor’s civic status and toward the ways in which the donor came by the funds contributed.
Trade-Offs for Nonprofits
For this reason, a name can be a heavy burden for an institution to carry. This is especially the case at a moment like our own, when there is such a wide range of views on the trade-offs between the benefits and harms delivered by the companies producing the profits that feed much mega-philanthropy.
Consider a few recent examples. Before he blasted off to space aboard his Blue Origin rocket, Jeff Bezos gave $200 million to the Smithsonian National Air & Space Museum, much of which will go to create a Bezos Learning Center. But the space race also occasioned renewed critiques of Amazon’s labor and environmental practices. Does Bezos’s name being emblazoned on the Smithsonian’s walls represent an intervention into that debate? Or can the name stay silent in it?
Or take the $75 million gift Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, made in 2015 to San Francisco General Hospital (the city’s public hospital, where Chan worked as a pediatrician), after which the hospital took as its formal name the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center.
Last December, based on widespread anti-Facebook activism, San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors condemned the decision to offer naming rights to the couple and called on “city departments to establish clear standards with regards to naming rights for public institutions and properties that reflect San Francisco’s values and a commitment to affirming and upholding human rights, dignity, and social and racial justice.”
And then there’s the example of the private-equity baron Stephen Schwarzman, who’s played a philanthropic Johnny Appleseed in recent years, scattering his name and nine-figure donations across the higher-ed landscape. Yet at many of the institutions that now bear his name, there have been protests as others associated with those universities raise objections to extending the institutions’ imprimatur to what one writer characterized as the “rapacious business model” at the root of Schwarzman’s philanthropy, to say nothing of his support for Donald Trump.
In fact, when Abington High School, which Schwarzman attended, initially agreed to rename itself Abington Schwarzman High School in exchange for $25 million for a large-scale renovation project, there was such a massive public outcry that the school dropped the name (though it offered instead to name the school’s science and technology center after him).
A Gilded-Age Boom
In the United States, although the practice of naming charitable institutions or entities after donors who had funded them goes back to the early colonial era, the first real boom in naming rights, especially involving living donors, came during the first Gilded Age, in the final decades of the 19th century and beginning decades of the 20th, when industrial and financial fortunes were channeled toward colleges, universities, museums, hospitals, and parks across the nation. Many of the names then affixed to those institutions still dominate the nonprofit landscape.
But even during that period, concerns emerged about naming institutions after major donors. Some of the period’s most notable philanthropists were not fully comfortable with the practice.
John D. Rockefeller, for instance, turned down repeated appeals by the University of Chicago, an institution whose development he nearly single-handedly funded, to name prominent buildings on campus after him; the refusal stemmed from his belief that there was something distasteful about being so ostentatious about one’s giving.
Sears, Roebuck’s Julius Rosenwald argued against philanthropists attaching their names to institutions since it would lead other donors — and taxpayers — to lose a sense of responsibility to care for them as well. At the same time, a militant labor movement often expressed outrage at having key civic institutions tarnished by the name of men who exploited workers for profit.
A carpenter’s union protested a library in Mobile, Ala., funded by steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, for instance, by explaining it as the industrialist’s effort to “rear an enduring monument to himself here … that his fame may go down in history as one of the greatest philanthropists of the age when in reality he is one of the most infamous oppressors of labor on the American continent.” That library was rejected by the community, but Carnegie’s name was etched into hundreds of edifices across the country. On many of them, the name remains to this day.
Legal and Policy Remedies
The last several decades have brought another wave of massive private fortunes, parts of which have sluiced out onto the charitable terrain, marking it with the names of leading tech and finance titans, investors, and entrepreneurs.
There is little doubt that the offer of naming rights has become one of the most effective lures in the fundraisers’ bait box and that the money that the possibility of named recognition has brought in has done much good.
But it’s also possible to see the proliferation of such names across the charitable landscape, and the prevalence of the practice of offering naming rights, as a challenge to the construction and preservation of public values and mores.
That challenge has already elicited a number of responses.
A host of legal scholars, for instance, have proposed recognizing that naming rights represent a real benefit for the donor that should be taken into account when calculating what part of a charitable donation is tax deductible. This would at least mean that the public would gain some additional benefit from named rights in increased tax revenue.
Many institutions have also begun to include time limits to naming rights in gift agreements (the Smithsonian, for instance, instituted a 20-year naming rights limit in 2011), allowing a reset for donors whose reputations have become toxic. Other lawyers have stressed the value of incorporating morals clauses into gift agreements, which would give the charity the right to remove a donor’s name from an institution if the donor acts in a manner that adversely affects the reputation of the charity.
A Public Response
These all seem like sound ideas, and it is encouraging that more charitable institutions are taking them up. But given that the public also bears the burden of the named institutions, what should its response — our response — be?
Here’s my suggestion.
First, we should resist the temptation, fueled by cynicism, to ignore the names, to regard them as merely an overrun part of the flora of the second Gilded Age landscape. Instead, we need to increase our attentiveness to them. This requires taking an encounter with a named institution as a sort of civic challenge, an invitation to inquire who the donor is and how that person acquired a fortune. (I failed this challenge for my initial encounters with the Sackler name, for instance; for many summers, while dropping my daughters off at a Smithsonian summer camp, I walked by the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery nearly every day, with little idea who he was.)
Mega-philanthropy, both through its coverage by the news media and in the way it touches our daily lives, provides one of the strongest provocations to citizens to grapple with the realities of our nation’s political economy and its relation to power and inequality.
But more than this, we also need to appreciate the opportunity named institutions offer for holding those donors accountable to the values embodied by those institutions.
In fact, one can make the argument — and I have — that far from obscuring their corporate misdeeds, Sackler philanthropy helped draw public attention to them. After all, it was museums like the Guggenheim (which still houses the Sackler Center for Arts Education) that became key sites of protest against the family.
Similarly, after the Capitol riots earlier this year, some 160 “Schwarzman Scholars,” graduate students who receive funding to study at a Chinese university, called on Schwarzman to stop providing donations to lawmakers or associations who opposed certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Schwarzman refused, but the protest received major news coverage.
But even as we respect the civic utility of named institutions, we can acknowledge the hubris inherent in them.
It’s worth reminding ourselves, as well as our wealthiest citizens, of the conceit often involved in attaching one’s name to a charitable institution or entity. Sometimes that conceit is justified. But many other times it is not.
Because offers of naming rights violate an ethic of humility and egalitarianism, we should help to maintain a basic presumption against them that would need to be actively, deliberately, and thoughtfully overridden with good cause by those extending and those accepting the offer. This is where maintaining a healthy, democratic allergy to the veneration of billionaires, and to indulging their self-importance, can come in handy.
Hold Up Exemplary People
Most important, the public can do more to praise donors who eschew the privilege of naming institutions after themselves. This does not necessarily mean that there should be a general promotion of anonymous giving, a practice that carries its own set of problems centered on a lack of transparency.
If donors want to maintain the privilege of naming, we should encourage them to do so after other individuals whom they want to celebrate and memorialize. In this case, it would make clearer the symbolic and didactic meaning inherent in a named institution — that it is holding up certain exemplary figures and connecting their identities to the values of the institutions.
This won’t get rid of controversy over named institutions; the decision to name a college or museum gallery after an admired individual is still an exercise of power that can clash with challenges to donor prerogatives more generally, and might alienate those who do not find the individual named actually admirable. (Witness, for instance, the pushback George Mason University received in honoring the wish of an anonymous donor and a major foundation to name its law school after conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia.)
Yet even so, this approach would open up enormous opportunities for donors to work with charitable institutions to identify names that they want to honor and be associated with. Given that those with personal fortunes large enough to make named gifts are disproportionately white, this approach would also represent an important expansion of the pool of those individuals whose talent and character are celebrated in the public sphere.
And besides, if donors are really set on having their names on buildings, it still leaves available one way of achieving that: live the sort of life and be the sort of person whom others want to name a building after.
