Yep. In grad school, the university took like 50% of the funds for our project, probably to plug budget gaps. I agree with the first comment:

"Relying on a university administration is generally not prudent. It is clear that the Family envisioned an effective "new business," in the spirit of a venture or a "start-up" and those kinds of projects take serious business execution. In my experience, the Pearson's complaint merely exposes the tip of the iceberg as far as what the donor "sausage machine" looks like in a major university. Lesson? Donors need to act more like active investors, despite the general hard resistance universities put up."

They were expecting university administrators to provide "serious business execution".

For 22 million they did what exactly? Hired someone who didn’t want the job at the last minute to avoid legal issues, who hired junior professors for roles that were meant to be prestigious.

Instead of hosting a conference, they attended a Catholic conference promoting traditional marriage.

It’s a public policy institute, not cancer research. That should have been a substantial endowment with perpetual time scale of $5-10M/year. Considering a tenure professor is $1-200k (with overhead to take care of building) and a world class conference is $500k-1M, this should be substantial.

For comparison, the Harvard Kennedy school has a $1.2B endowment and has 500 faculty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_School_of_Gove...) so with $200M that could be 50-75 top notch professors.

Haha look at you, defending rich people for free!

Ok, yep those numbers add up to other numbers

But let’s not pretend that tells the whole story. No one here was in those meetings.

If that is true, don't you think the university had a duty to communicate that? It seems like the u of Chicago promised them a first class institute and is not delivering. If that was never possible then it seems like a clear bad faith agreement.

It was the second largest donation in the school's history, and if it really was a paltry sum, UChi could have just rejected the donation, or at least rejected the donation if it came with any strings attached.