Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Hello, wealthy person! Are you ready to admit that piling up Birkin bags and “collectible” cars is slowly leaching away your soul? Are you tired of pretending that a $500 bottle of wine tastes meaningfully different than the one your personal assistant gets at BevMo? Most important, do you want to drive your frenemies straight up the walls because you are still ostentatiously collecting expensive things at a massive scale, but everyone is forced to admit that it’s because you are such a good person?
It's time to start getting buildings named after you! Oh, do Brooks and Madsy have a new yacht? Pfft. Get yourself a classy granite slab on a building at the local university and watch them seethe. Don’t forget to drive the nails all the way in: “Oh, darlings, a yacht! How nice for you. It’s so lovely that you feel free to spend money on pure pleasure. We haven’t made it out sailing even once this season. We’ve been so busy with the opening of the Cancer Center.” You will win that brunch at the hunt club. Absolutely crush it.
It’s easier than you think. Right now, colleges and universities are absolutely gagging to name a building after you. You used to have to go to a lot of boring dinners and serve on tiresome committees as a windup to get your name bolted to a load-bearing wall, but since the Trump administration has started yanking NIH grants, extorting universities for hundreds of millions of dollars, and openly rooting for the destruction of American higher education, our cherished pedagogic institutions are in danger of collapsing. Like taken over by crows and coyotes collapsing. University development officers are highly motivated right now. There are meth addicts with more chill.
This isn’t a plaque for your living room, not a trophy to leave in your home office in precisely the right place for visitors to see it if Oops! Did you leave that pesky door open again? This is not some flimsy certificate of appreciation or an awards dinner that starts fading into the past the second you have downed the last bite of your flourless chocolate cake.
This is a building, a behemoth of bricks and mortar and ductwork. For about five million dollars, you can put your name on it permanently, forever, stabbing the hearts of your enemies long after you are gone. That’s a bargain and a half. And again: Even our most prestigious universities are in real danger of collapsing. Development officers are currently tasked with scrounging for change in their couches and cupholders. I bet you can knock a couple hundred thou’ off that asking price. A couple million will get an entire program named after you. I bet you can get a wing for a million flat.
Remember that professor who made you feel stupid and insecure in college? Would you like to drive him into an absolute lather of complicated frustrations? Endow a chair for him. He will, for the rest of his academic career, have to introduce himself as “Professor Nelson Dweebmeyer, the [Your Name!] Chair of Chemistry.” He will also have to write a report to you every year to prove that he’s using your endowment money well. The humiliation will eat away at his health, and he will have to go to the [Your Name!] Center for Advanced Cardiovascular Care every goddamned time he needs a checkup.
On that note, donating to university medical centers before you get sick is an incredible one-two punch of showing your commitment to the community while acting in naked self-interest. Research that family medical history, choose your building wisely, spend a couple of decades reaping the accolades, and then rest easy knowing that they take extra-good care of you when they walk under your name to get to work every day.
Donating to research works too! If you open your window and angle an ear just right, you will hear hundreds of scientific researchers running around with their lab coats flapping in the wind screaming “But we almost had a cure!” Their grants are either gone or in danger of getting yanked because of things like their study had the word “integrated” in the title and there is nothing they can do to make the Trump Administration understand that they’re talking about integrating amino acids. There is lifesaving research right now that you can step in and save and—most important—put your name on. And they will thank you profusely.
Do you live in California? Remember that part when everything was on fire? Make a nameworthy gift to a small cell lung cancer lab or a burn center today, right now, and you will have incontrovertible proof that you are a part of the solution instead of someone whose view-blocking palatial estate uses enraging amounts of water.
And if you have enough money? You don’t even need to be a serious person about it. I know of at least one campus that has two different buildings that have been graced with the same name, and yes, of course they are a frantic little hike apart. Watching people break heels and scatter papers as they steeplechase from one building to the other, trying to figure out where their appointment or 8 am class is? That, my wealthy friend, is power. Don’t forget to “accidentally” tell Brooks and Madsy to go to the wrong one.
And sure, you can play it straight and name that orthopedic wing or particle accelerator after yourself or a loved one, but if you’re really loaded, why not test a few boundaries? If your gift comes with naming rights, that means you have the right to pick any name at all, does it not? Keep putting another million on the pile until the university president grits her teeth and says that yes, actually, she would be delighted to name the new stem cell lab after your great-great granduncle, Ignatius Q. Farhtenhoffen. Name it after your dog and force them to announce that today’s budget meeting will be in Colonel Fuzzywuffles 415. Make them pull out a duck call, a pair of castanets, and a slide trombone to even pronounce the name of your building.
Fancy cigars and tacky gold plating are kid stuff. Real prestige comes from saving a piece of the American higher educational system. Real power comes from stopping years of cancer research from disappearing. Real respect comes from funding a children’s hospital. You know, like the one that just announced hundreds of layoffs because those monsters are killing NIH grants and cutting Medicaid. (By the way, red state Trumpers whose reaction to a children’s hospital laying of staffers is “Ha ha, Los Angeles deserves that,” you should know that CHLA takes in children from all over the country for little things like transplants and complex heart surgeries and cancer care. So, if you aren’t moved by the fact that children will die because of this, maybe think about the fact that “your” kids are going to be harmed by this too, which is how these things freaking work.)
So pull out your wallet and make a positive difference for both the world and your permanent reputation. Because other people can focus on that bummer poem all they want: Ozymandias had mad respect for a couple hundred years. You will too.
