LAW & POLICY
“University combs gifts for new uses.” By Vivian Yee. Yale Daily News. February 23, 2010. Over the summer, a group of University administrators and staff dug into Yale’s $16 billion endowment, which is essentially a pool of some 9,300 separate funds, in search of any loose change that could be used to close a $300 million budget gap. As it turned out, the SWAT team, as its members nicknamed themselves, found hundreds of gifts established to fund specific purposes — some of them as old as Yale itself — whose income had lain untouched in Yale’s coffers for years. Administrators from the offices of Development, the Provost, Finance and Administration, and the General Counsel swept the 150 funds with the largest unused balances, which amounted to more than $1 million in some cases, cataloged them in a database and started to see if the funds could be put to better use. Then they turned their attention to the funds with less leftover money. From prize money for Latin compositions to student scholarship funds to an endowed professorship in railroad engineering, many of the gifts Yale has received have become obsolete or forgotten, and have accumulated untouched or can be used for purposes broader than their original intents. To help departments and programs make the deep budget cuts forced by the endowment’s 24.6 percent plunge, administrators are asking departments to depend less on funding from the general operating budget and more on gift money. “We are religious about honoring explicit intentions,” said Provost Peter Salovey. Though the University has occasionally tried to repurpose gifts in recent years, this effort has intensified over the past year as Yale has faced a budget shortfall.
“Dueling preschools: Neighbors object to second Montessori school on Mountain View street.” By Diana Samuels. San Jose Mercury-News. February 23, 2010. Two preschools on one street is one preschool too many, a group of Mountain View residents says. Plans to open a Montessori preschool at 1050 El Monte Ave. in Mountain View — essentially across the street from another Montessori preschool, the Child Development Center at St. Paul Lutheran Church — have riled neighbors who say the new school will cause traffic and parking problems. The neighbors filed an appeal in December against zoning decisions allowing the preschool, and the city council will take up the issue today.
“Clergy Dispute C Street Group’s Tax-Exempt Status.” By Peter Overby. Morning Edition. National Public Radio. February 24, 2010. The C Street Center is a religious organization based in a townhouse on Capitol Hill. The townhouse has been home to several members of Congress. But a group of ministers has filed a complaint with the IRS alleging that the organization is falsely labeling itself a tax-exempt religious establishment.
“Manifesto From the Battle for the Barnes Collection.” By Manohla Dargis. Movie Review. New York Times. February 26, 2010. Money, power, race, a mansion stuffed with treasure, a city plagued by scandal — about all that’s missing from “The Art of the Steal,” a hard-hitting documentary about a high-cultural brawl, is a hot woman with a warm gun. At the heart of the movie, energetically directed and argued by Don Argott, is the celebrated Barnes Foundation, which houses a private collection in suburban Philadelphia (here, a city of brotherly love and loathing) groaning with European masterworks, African sculptures, Asian prints, American Indian ceramics, among other items. The foundation even owns a farmhouse furnished with decorative arts, and its surrounding 12-acre arboretum is filled with rare flora from around the globe. It isn’t the Chilean monkey puzzle tree, though, that has had curators, academics, journalists and politicians pointing fingers and crying foul in recent years: it’s the art, especially the post-Impressionist and early Modernist paintings signed by the likes of Cézanne, Picasso, Renoir, Degas, Manet, Monet and Van Gogh. Amassed by a working-class striver turned collector named Dr. Albert C. Barnes (1872-1951), these paintings are the glittering prizes in the foundation that bears his name and that in total has been valued at more than $25 billion, though the collection is sometimes breathlessly described as priceless. In his will Barnes stipulated that the collection was to remain in its original locale, far from the reach of the Philadelphia elite he despised. But contracts can be broken, wills challenged, legacies dismantled.