UCSB Receives Its Largest Donation Ever

So let me get this straight, he is giving them $30 million to build a building named after himself, and another $20 million goes in the form of an "estate commitment" which means after they both move on to the after world UCSB gets the $$. Sorry not to look a gift horse in the face, but this seems a little out of touch to me. There are tons of new buildings all over the place out there, and he wants one another one named after him for the whole $30 million. (They already have Henley gate or entrance or whatever). Our youth struggle with high tuition, and student loans which will set them back years into their futures, and a crappy job market, I would think doing something for them NOW would be nice. Because after you build the building and fill it with high $$ teachers, how will the building sustain itself? Thru these kids (and parents) exorbitant tuition.

The donation to UCSB by Jeff & Judith Henley is very generous and I am sure much appreciated. It would be nice if they would show similar magnanimity toward Santa Barbara City College which took a six-million dollar hit when Oracle failed, after five years of trying, to design and implement an "integrated data management system" for the college. This lost money is today sorely missed and hurting the campus.

Maybe, just maybe, he's giving a building so the UCSB doesn't p*** the money away on excessive compensation amd pensions. Nice gratitude, bimboteskie. It is HIS money, after all - he gets to do with it as he wants. How much have YOU donated?

Student tuition accounts for a very small piece of the pie and thus giving the students a break for maybe a year with the donated money would be a poor investment when considering the long term benefits to the engineering and energy efficiency departments. The UC system brings in the largest portion of it's funding from it's medical facilities and the second highest contribution is from the DoD. Hopefully the betterment of the engineering department from this donation will increase the amount of funding it receives. Investment in energy efficiency is a no brainer.

I haven't donated anything to UCSB and don't plan on it. Tell me John Locke, what has UCSB donated to the LOCAL community lately? All I see is take take take and more more more without any more of our local kids getting into the school there. Actually less. Granted, a generous donation, but I doubt this 30 million building will change anything for this guy financially, and the 20 million after, he won't even be here. You can't take it with you!
Conversely, regarding the choice to endow the sciences and energy conservation is pretty cool. It just seems to me they already have enough brand spanking new buildings out there.

Let's see, $50 million at $5000 per student scholarship would yield 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) scholarships all at once. If put into an endowment, that chunk of cash would go even farther, indefinitely.

I'm sick of the edifice complexes exhibited by showroom donors. Buildings don't educate the future, people do, both as instructors and as students, some of the latter becoming future instructors. And so on down the line.

I'm proud to be one of the latter, a UCSB graduate from the '70s, co-lecturing for one class every two years. It used to be every year, until the first round of major budget cuts eight years ago. From our modest income (my wife and I), last year we donated three thousand dollars to several different UCSB funds in Geography and Environmental Studies, amounting to about 5-6% of our pre-tax gross income. So, when we see another couple donating $50 million for another goddamned building, at a showcase event that totally shut down the Bren building (irony intended), we have to think, "Why bother?"

We have the answer to our own question: because it matters, one student at a time. Would that future donors consider that a little more, for the future.