Members of the University of New Hampshire community are up in arms after administrators decided to use part of a $4 million gift from one of their late library staffers to install a new scoreboard at the school’s football stadium.
The late Robert Morin, a 50-year staff member of the Dimond Library at the University of New Hampshire, shocked the community after his passing when they learned that he had left his entire $4 million fortune to the school. Morin, who was also a graduate of the university, asked that $100,000 of his fortune go directly to the library. He told his financial advisor that he trusted the school to “figure out what to do with” the rest.
Administrators drew the ire of students and alumni when they announced that they had decided to use $1 million of Morin’s gift for a video scoreboard for the school’s newly renovated football stadium. Community members weren’t happy with the decision, arguing that the stadiums $25 million budget should have been more than enough.
“Apparently, $25 million just wasn’t enough,” wrote one graduate, arguing that the decision is “a complete disgrace to the spirit and memory of Robert Morin.”
Another University of New Hampshire alumnus echoed the same sentiment: “I am not inherently opposed to some of the money going to the football program. I am opposed to it going to a scoreboard which, in the age of planned obsolescence, will be out of date in 5? 10? Years.”
“Use it to endow a scholarship for a player who wants to go to grad school maybe. … Pay it forward; make it meaningful,” she added.
Administrators at the University of New Hampshire tried to justify the decision by claiming that Morin became a passionate fan of the school’s football team in the last 15 months of his life. “In the last 15 months of his life Morin lived in an assisted living center where he started watching football games on television, mastering the rules and names of the players and teams,” the school wrote in a 2016 press release.
An investigative piece on the controversy published this week by Deadspin argues that the university used Morin as a marketing prop. “It was on measures like this that UNH cheated Morin by treating him less like a human being than a marketing prop,” author Craig Fehrman wrote. “This treatment had started early, of course, during those initial PR huddles, and it only got worse once a real backlash to the scoreboard emerged.”
“The librarian’s fandom had absolutely nothing to do with the scoreboard,” Fehrman added, “but through a careful and shameless juxtaposition, UNH implied that it had.”
Fortunately, $2.5 million from the gift will go towards a new career center for University of New Hampshire students and alumni.
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