If a gift requires further spending later and the overall benefit is net negative, its up to the university to negotiate terms or turn it down.

It's all university leadership failing to steward their university.

Taking into account fictional future donations and communicating with donator and explaining the issue is called negotiation. Being convinced to make bad financial decisions in fear of losing a donator is again, a failure of leadership.

If someone offers you $10 if you spend $100 later you're better off not taking it, even if you could have bought something with that $10. That basic financial stewardship is the role of university leadership to deal with. They failed.

Not (always) true. Direct example with Carnegie Mellon - David Tepper was upset the business school (his alma mater) was appearing to fall behind in recruiting, so he donated ~100m but tied it to the business school getting a new building/quad. Total cost to the university was well north of 200mil; and their hands were functionally tied in how it was spent.

Yes, I know this is an outlier and yes, university leadership could have said no - but you're risking pissing off a doner who's given 100m+ over the years and will likely continue giving (and you know Tepper will continue guiding further capital expenditures as he sees the need).

"Your $100m gift will cost us $200m, we can't accept it as currently stipulated".

All university leadership decisions that they failed on.

SUNY Binghamton recently received a private donation of $60 million, with a rule from the person donating it had to be spent on a new baseball stadium. Do you think the university leadership should have declined the offer?

What good is a $60 million donation if it costs you $100 million on something you weren't going to buy in the first place?

The entire point of this thread is that universities aren't doing that, because they're accepting $100 million donations with quarter-billion dollar lifetime price tags tied with them.