Are Strings Attached?

Today's New York Times article When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities rekindles concerns over the ethical and moral issues of big donations to educational institutions.

Two years after the announcement of the $300 million gift from private collector Shelby White to New York University to finance a new Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), the furor seems to have faded, if not completely disappeared. Ms. White, who has been criticized for allegedly collecting objects that are looted from their countries of origin, recently returned a number of disputed objects to Italy.

Robert K. Durkee, vice president and secretary of Princeton was quoted in the article that “Institutions do get shaped by the interests of donors”. We can only hope that the fears of Randall White, a professor of anthropology at NYU for 25 years, who resigned his honorary position with the university’s existing Center for Ancient Studies in protest over NYU's acceptance of the gift are unfounded.

According to its website, "ISAW is a center for advanced scholarly research and graduate education, intended to cultivate comparative and connective investigations of the ancient world." Perhaps the study and "analysis of artifacts", also mentioned on ISAW's website, will emphasize the importance of documentation and context, so that such investigations may be possible.

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