V w w w v a v w ww w w w w no WensaSpebr1,0 0 -ThMiignD The stories behind the dubious names of campus landmarks By Donn M. Fresard | Daily Staff Reporter IS NAMING andy Weill is no saint. A billionaire and a titan of the finance industry, he's landed in hot water for bribing executives and stock analysts. When he was chairman of Citigroup, it had to pay billions to investors after it helped defraud them by playing three-card monte with Enron's and WorldCom's finances. To legalize full-service superbanks like Citi, he muscled through Congress a repeal of the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act - a move that, some argue, helped make possible the mortgage crisis that's forcing millions of Americans out of their homes. So it's only natural that the Univer- sity would name its new public policy building after him. To be fair, the school itself is named after former President GeraldFord, the only Michigan alum to reach the Oval Office, and Ford wanted the building to be named for Weill and his wife Joan, both close friends of the president. Ford is a hero here, and "his stamp of approval means a lot," says Paul Cou- rant, who was provost when the deal went through. Plus, Weill chipped in $5 million to bankroll the project. It might have been the first time the University named a building for some- one after he was caught in a scandal, but it's nothing new to see a controver- sial figure's name printed on campus maps. To take one example, there's a Ross School of Business building named for Sam Wyly, a Dallas rascal billionaire and University donor who's under investigation for tax evasion. He and his brother, Charles - they're often called, no kidding, the "Wyly Coyotes" - are prominent Republican donors who are notorious for funding the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads that sunk John Kerry's 2004 presiden- tial campaign. Their money is so dirty that John McCain returned $20,000 of it in 2006. Of course, we shouldn't concern our- selves with our donors' politics, and you wouldn't expect people at the Ross School to care. But inside the more lib- eral Ford School, where the walls are adorned with plaques celebratingFord's other friends who donated - most of them seem to be officials from vari- ous Republican administrations - you have to imagine there's a little chagrin. There's even a classroom named for Paul O'Neill, the disastrous two-year Treasury secretary under George W. Bush. President Ford was a real Michi- gan Man, God bless him, but the com- pany he kept will be making new public policy students at Michigan scratch their heads for generations to come. T he more you look at campus build- ings' namesakes, the more you realize how often they come with an ironic back story. Take Alfred Taub- man, the University dropout and con- victed felon whose $30 million got him naming rights for the College of Archi- tecture and Urban Planning. He's most notorious forthe Sotheby's price-fixing scheme, which landed him a one-year prison sentence in 2002 and led some to call for the University to rename the college. (Lee Bollinger, the president at the time, demurred.) But to focus on Taubman's auction-house career is to miss the point - which is that even in 1999, when the University accepted his gift, the Bloomfield Hills native was a dubious namesake for the college. In his first career, Taubman made a fortune by pioneering and then domi- nating the shopping-mall industry. That may not seem like much of an offense to most, but to urban plan- ners, it makes him a pariah. Without going into the details too much, urban planning students like relatively dense cities where you can walk most places you need to go. Malls tend to suck peo- ple away from urban centers, killing downtown businesses, contributing to sprawl and encouraging an unsustain- able "car culture." At least to the urban planningaside, naming the college after Alfred Taubman is a little like naming the Law School after Jesse James. Another darkly funny case is that of the new Walgreen Drama Center, brought to you by University alum Charles Walgreen Jr., the former president of the Walgreens drug-store chain who died in February. Some were disappointed when the Univer- sity announced that the Arthur Miller Theater, named for the late playwright who was one of Michigan's marquee alums, would be housed inside the Walgreen Center rather than the other way around. It seemed like just another exam- ple of the University's desperation for donors - until last October, when Dale Winling connected the dots in a gleeful post on his blog, Urbanoasis. org. It turns out Walgreen's father, Charles Sr., ignited a media firestorm in 1935 when he initiated a Communist witch-hunt at the University of Chi- cago, resulting in a professor's firing. The story has close parallels to Honors at Dawn, which Miller wrote as a stu- dent in 1937, winning him his second Hopwood Award. Even if Miller's play wasn't an anti-McCarthyist roman a clef about Walgreen himself, it's hard to imagine the drama center's name would be Miller's first choice. S tephen Darwall, the director of the LSA Honors Program and a phi- losophy professor who specializes in ethics, doesn't see much of a problem with all this. The University needs big-time donors to make up for wan- ing state support, he points out, and it's unfair to condemn an executive's entire career for one or two minor slip-ups. What he would object to, though, is naming buildings, schools and col- leges after corporations. That, he says, would lead to questions about the unit's mission, and it would be a clear sign that the University is being used to advertise a brand. "Corporations are to make money - just by defini- tion," he says. That's not just an academic ques- tion. At the University of Iowa, the faculty of the College of Public Health just this month voted down a proposal to take $15 million from Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield in exchange for naming rights. Most were concerned that naming the college after an insur- ance company would taint its reputa- tion for impartial research. Could it happen here? There aren't any rules against it, says Bob Groves, associate vice president for devel- opment. But it doesn't seem likely, See NAMES, Page 9B CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: A portrait of donor Sam Wyly on the wall in Wyly Hall on Tappan Street. (EMMA NOLAN-ABRA- HAMIAN/Daily) Sanford Weill at a dedica- tion event at Cornell University (AP) Alfred Taubman speaks at the University. (COUR- TESY OF THE A. ALFRED TAUBMAN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE) The Wal- green Drama Center on the corner of Mur- fin and Bonisteel Streets on North Campus. (EMMA NOLAN-ABRAHAMIAN/Daily) Weill Hall on South State Street. (EMMA NOLAN-ABRAHAMIAN/Daily) Rackham Graduate School on North University Avenue. (EMMA NOLAN-ABRAHAMIAN/ Daily) A Wyly Hall courtyard from inside the building. (EMMA NOLAN-ABRAHA- MIAN/Daily)