Hard Up For Cash, Harvard Sells Naming Rights
There has been quite a bit of coverage on how the recession is affecting the august Harvard University. For example, the undergraduates aren’t getting hot breakfast anymore.
Meanwhile, over at Harvard Law School, things have gotten so bad that HLS is looking to sell off some naming rights to wealthy donors. Tax Prof Blog reports:
The following list provides a representative sample of named gift opportunities. In addition, several naming opportunities exist in the Law School’s Northwest Corner building project currently under construction.* $25,000,000: International Graduate Student Fellowship Program, The Low Income Protection Plan Program
* $10,000,000: The Harvard Law Library Reading Room, Research Program (Academic/Clinical)
* $5,000,000: Combined Professorship and Research Fund
* $4,000,000: Professorship
* $2,000,000: Visiting Professorship
* $1,000,000: Research Fund
* $250,000: Scholarship/Fellowship Fund
* $100,000: Financial Aid Fund
* $10,000: Revolving Loan Fund
Remember, Harvard is only called “Harvard” because John Harvard had a nice library.
Maybe graduates of Harvard Business School can still afford to make lavish $25,000,000 gifts; alas, graduates of Harvard Law School probably don’t have that kind of flow anymore. But why should they be iced out of the naming game?
After the jump, let me suggest some low-cost naming rights that HLS could sell.
Item: Gannett House
Ask Price: $1.4 million and new plumbing
Possible Bidder: Barack Obama
Obama has to do something with his Nobel Prize money. Why not stick his name and credibility on Gannett House, home to the Harvard Law Review? He could rename it “Hope House,” since getting on the Law Review is the dream of so many unfulfilled HLS students.
Item: All Other HLS Journals
Ask Price: $10
Possible Bidder: Sam Walton Mike Duke
Of course, HLS has a lot of journals that are not the Harvard Law Review. They do good work; they are just less well-known. Enter Mike Duke, CEO of Wal-Mart. Can you imagine how well the Harvard Civil Rights - Civil Liberties Law Review would do with product placement next to The Lost Symbol? Call it the “Civil Liberties Saver,” and you are sitting on publishing gold! The ask price may even be too low — Duke should be willing to pay at least $50 for this.
Item: HLS Career Services
Ask Price: $1 billion
Possible Bidder: U.S. Congress.
Has TARP created one job? What about the stimulus package? HLS Career Services has. The positive press from being associated with people who are actually finding jobs for people has to be worth at least $1,000,000,000 to our Congress. The “Pelosi Placement Agency” could be something for them to campaign on.
Item: Supreme Court Clerkship
Ask Price: $120,000
Possible Bidder: Tier 2, 3 or 4 law student with excellent grades
Are you at the top of your class at a lower tier school? Do you have no reasonable shot at a SCOTUS clerkship because you spent too much time drinking and whoring in college to get into a top law school? Well, for the low, low price of roughly three years of HLS tuition, HLS will vouch for your credentials when you send them into Supreme Court justices. Limited time offer, first come, first served.
Item: Charlie Nesson
Ask Price: We pay you!
Possible Bidder: Any Coherent Law Professor
Charlie Nesson has had a long and storied career at HLS. But after he went on the Colbert Report earlier this year, HLS has had enough. The man has tenure, so the law school can’t get rid of him. But if someone could take Nesson off of HLS’s hands (perhaps sending him to Uruguay to work on Chupacabra defense), there might be a nice payoff in it for somebody. (J/k: Professor Nesson is the best!)
Naming Opportunities at Harvard Law School [Tax Prof Blog]
(44) Comments
Comments
Yale should buy the naming rights for all of these
first?
3rd
FIRST sign of tergiversation.
Sam Walton is dead. Very classy.
I was going to sharpshoot all of the absolutely nasty grammar errors in this post, but then I figured that it must have been written by Future Ellie. If he's not going to see/respond to my critique for 15+ years then why bother?
We can play a game, though. There are 10 or so paragraphs in the post. Can we pick out at least one error from each of them?
I always worried about unfilled HLS students.
this could have been so much funnier :(
Is BC doing this as well? What about WashU St. Louis? Emory? Oh wait, that would only matter to people who went to those schools......
No one gives a crap about what Harvard is doing, Elie.
6:
"as getting on the law review is the dream of so many unfilled HLS students. "
I'd call this an error if I knew what it meant.
-A filled HLS student
6,
"But graduates of Harvard Law School don’t have that kind of flow anymore. But why should they be iced out of the naming game?"
-I've got two "but"s and I cannot lie.
"The ask price may even be too low, Duke should be willing to pay at least $50 for this."
What a weird compounded sentence. What is your first language, Elie?
VeriTTTas
Harvard could just give Obama the naming rights to Gannett House without him actually doing anything.
Shouldn't that be "chupacabra"
This is a very funny post. Nice work Elie.
Discover Card is trying to execute on its judgment against PE. They plan to seize his Pontiac Grand Am this afternoon to satisfy part of their claim. PE and JaKe are trying to elude the repo men and will not be posting much today.
Good work, commenters / copy editors! Most of the typos in this post have been fixed.
Um, HLS was doing this way before the rescission hit.
Harvard should start a 'refund' fund for members of the class of 2010 & 2011. Those students should get a refund for their troubles and a nice recommendation to go work as an 'apprentice' with a gainfully employed Harvard Alum. Some might call this the Low Income Protection Plan, or the Harvard name connections, but I call it living up to your effing promises.
Thanks for nothing HLS.
20 here,
Possible Bidder for the 'refund' fund for the underemployed: Alberto Gonzales
I think Harvard should consider renaming its financial aid program after Section 90 of the Restatement of Contracts..."The Promissory Estoppel" fund, where students are paid after relying on HLS' promises to find students jobs in BigLaw.
20 do you want to hear me play the world's smallest violin?
Any update on Winston's firm-wide meeting today?
In Soviet Russia, fellowship program names you!
Soda POPINSKI! YES!
Can they name the ice skating rink after Enron?
Wait, there are unemployed HLS grads?
So fucking bored today, and this blog is doing nothing to entertain me.
We need to bomb Russia back to the stoneage!
-DOJ Secure
20,
How bad are things at HLS? Maybe we could have a similar program at NYU.
I suppose that I should know the answer to this, but is Harvard Law School accredited by the American Bar Association and a member in good standing of the Association of American Law Schools?
Doesn't Harvard also have the C. Montgomery Burns International Airport?
I am personally distressed that I was not made aware of the opportunity to give back to an institution that gave me so much over the years before I donated my Nobel Peace Prize winnings to ACORN. I would have loved to endow the Ayers chair in radical redistibution theory at HLS with some of the prize money.
It is my sincerest hope that ACORN will share not just social philosophy with HLS but a little of the Nobel money as well. It is my further hope that both organizations will use that money to continue their important work in the areas of redistributive social theory and jurisprudence.
Barack x.
Doesn't every other law school in the country already do this?
Or as Donor Stud might put it:
Rich alums at my law school used to buy the naming rights to classrooms and reading rooms and professorships all the time. It was no big deal.
25 - I like it.
33-
No, that was Yale. Burns is a Yalie.
YALE SECURE!
Burns: "Are you mad? I'm not made of international airports!!"
Why on earth would someone pay $25 million for the international graduate program when you could buy the law library name for "only" $10 million?
I love the smell of self-aggrandizing elitism in the morning...
Any naming rights costing over $1 million are the nepotist blue-blood's form of an STD. Now those who got screwed in the ass with no lube by the self-entitled amoral FTT elitists can put a name to the rapist giving this country a terminal infection instead of referring to a collective whole.
The incestuous law-industrial complex that places profit-sharing over principle has rendered the productive members of society impotent. Would that we reclaim the meritocracy of the legal profession stolen by the vile FTT self-dealers.
1 - do you have any idea how much more money Harvard has than Yale?
41- EPIC FAIL
You are terrible- absolutely horrible.
Absolutely, epicly terrible. A combination of a complete unmitigated disaster, an epic failure of biblical proportions, and the worst things imaginable.
41 - I'm lucky if I can make it through a Slate column...so no, I have little knolwedge or appreciation of ivy league culture, including endowment size.
- 1
Coming soon: Trotsky's International Graduate Student Fellowship Program*
*proletariat only may apply