Yale University is returning a $20-million gift to the donor, Lee M. Bass, Class of 1979. Mr. Bass, who gave the money to establish a program in Western civilization, wanted to choose the people who would teach in it.
The gift, which became mired in a debate over political correctness, was given to Yale in 1991. According to a university spokesman, Gary G. Fryer, Yale will repay the gift with interest.
In a formal statement, Mr. Bass said that he had not known until recently of the delay in beginning the program. Since December, he said, he had sought a new agreement with Yale that would have allowed him to approve the professors who would teach the courses.
The president of Yale, Richard C. Levin, said in a formal statement that it was inevitable that “friends must disagree from time to time.”
The university is committed to fulfilling its agreements with donors but is also “committed to fundamental institutional principles,” he said. “Since the two apparently cannot be reconciled in this instance, returning this gift is the right thing to do.”
In an interview, Mr. Fryer added that the university bore part of the blame for what happened because it had not communicated well with Mr. Bass -- whose Fort Worth, Tex., family has given $85-million to Yale since 1990 -- on the status of his gift. But the university supported the program, he said, noting that Yale already offers many courses in Western civilization.
Last week’s announcement marked the first time a gift had ever been returned by Yale. In higher education generally, similar episodes have been rare -- especially those involving such large sums. The last occurrence was in 1989, when a donation to the University of Utah of stock worth $15-million was revoked after the university decided not to name its medical school for the donor.
What happened at Yale was apparently the result of a peculiar confluence of events, including turnover in several key positions.
“This is an absolutely unique set of circumstances, and I think it is not germane in any way to the field or to what people’s normal expectations will be,” said Peter McE. Buchanan, president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education, an organization of fund raisers and public- relations officials.
Originally, the gift was to pay the salaries of seven full professors and four assistant professors who would create a yearlong program in Western civilization that was to begin in the fall of 1993. Five of the professors were named by Benno C. Schmidt, Jr., the former president of Yale, who solicited the gift. But then he resigned to become president of the Edison Project, a network of for-profit schools.
Although planning continued, issues arose that bogged down the program, Mr. Fryer said. One was whether the assistant professors would be chosen from the ranks of the faculty or be newly hired. The concern was that if people were shifted from existing posts, other courses would suffer, he said.
The Bass gift attracted media attention last fall, after Light and Truth, a conservative campus journal at Yale, featured an article that accused the university of holding up the program because liberal faculty members opposed it.
“The ideological agenda of many faculty, combined with a basic disregard for the alumni, has created a really poisonous brew,” said Pat Collins, the student who wrote the article, in an interview.
Mr. Levin and other Yale officials denied all along that ideology had played any role. The only reason the program was delayed, they said, was because the university was studying the best way to honor Mr. Bass’s wishes, and because there had been a four-year period of turnover in the offices of the president, the provost, and the dean of Yale’s undergraduate college.
A major concern, said Steven B. Smith, a professor of political science and director of special programs in the humanities, was how to add a new program when many departments were facing budget cuts. Mr. Smith was on a committee formed to make recommendations on the gift and said he was “depressed” about losing it.
“I think it’s disastrous -- not only for public relations, but for the uses to which we would have put it: the teaching of Western civilization and the strengthening of the humanities on campus.”
Robert T. Eskridge, a 1951 graduate and retired architect who lives in Coconut Grove, Fla., is so troubled by the Bass affair that he and his wife are considering removing Yale from their will. If that attitude spreads, it could haunt Yale, which is in the midst of a $1.5-billion capital campaign.
Other observers said Mr. Levin had made the only possible choice, given Mr. Bass’s request to approve the program’s professors.
“Once you move over that line and begin to have donors have the ability to direct which faculty will teach which courses, you have really lost an absolutely critical, fundamental part of the educational process,” said Neil L. Rudenstine, president of Harvard University. “Were Harvard to find itself in a similar position -- which we have not -- we would have to take precisely the same point of view.’