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After University of Missouri apparently neglected to follow the clear stipulations of a $5M gift to the business school, Hillsdale College sues to defend the donor’s intent.

Since this interesting case hit the news cycle, four people have suggested to me that I ought to write about the lawsuit Hillsdale College filed against the University of Missouri concerning a bequest Sherlock Hibbs made in 2002 that endowed four professorships in Missouri’s Trulaske School of Business. My four friends were right, so here are my thoughts on the Sherlock Hibbs case.

Thanks to Robby Soave of Reason, I have read the brief Hillsdale has filed in their lawsuit, so here are some facts from Hillsdale’s brief.

Hibbs died in 2002, and left $5 million to the University of Missouri to endow six professorships in Missouri’s business school. He declared that each professor hired under the terms of his bequest be “a dedicated and articulate disciple of the Ludwig von Mises (Austrian) school of economics.”

You could argue that Hibbs went too far in dictating what professors could teach. If the University of Missouri turned down Hibbs’ money, that might have been a principled stand for academic freedom. Or, as Philip Magness argues, Missouri could have hired Austrian economists and said that by doing this, they satisfied Hibbs’s intentions.

But what Missouri appears to have done is taken Hibbs’s money, including all its restrictions, and then ignored the restrictions. The brief filed by Hillsdale cites a statement by the dean of the University of Missouri’s business school in 2003 that “the Austrian school of economics is quite controversial. We didn’t want to wade into that controversy, so we focused on some Austrian tenets that are compatible with what we do in our business school.”

The University of Missouri might well have gotten away with it if Hibbs hadn’t made a very smart move. He appointed Hillsdale College, which has long had a tradition of hiring Austrian economists and which houses Ludwig von Mises’s library, to be a watchdog, and that every four years Missouri had to certify to Hillsdale that the professors hired under the Hibbs bequest were dedicated and articulate disciples of Mises. In 2017 Hillsdale decided that the professors funded under the Hibbs endowment were not Miseans, and sued.

The four professors hired under the Hibbs bequest—Rhonda Reger, Lisa Scheer, Karen Schnatterly, and Daniel Turban—may not have known the difference between Mises and measles in the past, but in 2018 they all signed sworn affidavits that they were “dedicated and articulate disciples” of Ludwig von Mises, and since have shown their love of Mises by refusing to share it with the press. Robby Soave tried to contact the four professors to see how Mises’s writings informed their research. Three of the four professors refused to respond, and the fourth referred Soave to the University of Missouri’s press spokesman, who argues that because Hibbs did not impose any restrictions on teaching, the university can do whatever it wants with Hibbs’s money.

I looked at the CVs of the four professors hired under the Hibbs bequest. One is an expert on recruitment. Two others are marketing professors. Karen Schnatterly is an expert in issues involving white-collar crime, and her CV cites the many media interviews she has given on how white-collar criminals operate. None of the four professors appear to be interested in the more theoretical sort of economics Austrians enjoy studying.

The Chronicle of Higher Education assigned an intern named Liam Knox to write the story about the Hibbs case. Knox, preparing for his career as an objective journalist, proclaimed that the Hibbs case involved “far-right economic ideology” and “a donor’s demands echoing from beyond the grave.” He interviewed someone named Ralph Wilson, “a founder of the Corporate Genome Project,” who claimed that Hibbs was part of a plot to “legitimize” right-wing ideas “and give them a reputation that seems unassailable.”

My goodness! Donors with ideas! We can’t have that!

Universities prefer donors who write checks and do not care how their money is used. A rising number of donors (and not just right-wing ones) would prefer that their money be used for causes they prefer, instead of what a university wants. The conflicts between donors and universities are one example of the problem of donor intent, which I studied in my book How Great Philanthropists Failed And How You Can Protect Your Legacy

I don’t know of any case involving an enforcement mechanism for honoring donor intent like the one Sherlock Hibbs created. I hope Hillsdale prevails in court, for I believe Missouri’s misuse of the Hibbs endowment is a severe violation of donor intent.


2 thoughts on “Hillsdale College sues University of Missouri over neglect of donor intent”

  1. john wild says:

    whatever happened to “Have A Koch And A Smile. While we all would like to teach the Earth to think in perfect harmony, it’s likely to get worse before any better. If China succeeds in resolving its Hong Kong problem, without it spreading to the mainland, then clearly this is the Chinese millennium.
    The President next November may indeed be trumped by the media and their socialist darlings on the Democratic party’s left. His constant tweeting only guarantees his base, but with reinforcement by the Never Trump’ers of the current media’s talking heads, those white, educated suburban wives will desert him and at best stay home. He better pray for Biden to be his opponent, as these two seventy somethings are clearly night and day when it comes to showing who is too old and feeble to lead. Biden’s handlers will have to let him appear for a debate, and Trump will take advantage. Tariffs may be effective, but clearly it’s all up to the market and the American consumer as to who takes office in January 2021. I’ll close my rant with “Socialism works, until you run out of other peoples money”.

  2. Martin Morse Wooster says:

    Ralph Wilson’s other activities include being one of the founders of UnKoch My Campus, which seeks to eliminate all funding by the Charles Koch Foundation to higher education. Christine Ravold wrote about Wilson’s efforts in “Unclear Funding for UnKoch” published by the Capital Research Center in 2018.

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