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Universities have been known to take donations from anyone willing to write a check. For those willing to donate significant amounts of money, usually alumni, there's sometimes an atrium, a street or even a building named after them as a tribute. Then renaming the University of Iowa's College of Public Health to The Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield School of Public Health shouldn't turn too many heads. Right?The University of Iowa is contemplating whether to rename its College of Public Health after the philanthropic arm of Blue Cross & Blue Shield in exchange for a $15M donation, USA Today reports. This has sparked debate on where universities should draw the line when accepting corporate gifts.
Terry Burton, a naming rights consultant based in British Columbia, told USA Today that Iowa would be the first public university to name a college after a corporation. There are over 40 higher-education institutions running $1B fundraising campaigns, according to Burton, and it's only logical that corporations would attempt to take part in those campaigns. "We're close to the tip of the sword for an AT&T School of Business or a Kodak School of Digital Communication. I can see that as not so far off," says Burton.
In the world of corporate sponsorships, it's amazing this concept idea hasn't caught on until now. Corporations have slapped their name on everything from people's foreheads to sports stadiums, all in the name of brand recognition.
Rich Foods may have entered the first modern naming-rights deal in the early 1970's with Rich Stadium, home of the NFL's Buffalo Bills. A few decades later, the dot-com era brought corporate sponsorship to a new level. Dot-coms, sitting on more cash then they knew what to do with, wanted to see their names in lights. Candlestick Park in San Francisco became 3Com Park in 1996, when 3Com Corporation (NASDAQ: COMS) was trading in the high teens. The Baltimore Ravens started their NFL career in 1999 at PSINet Stadium. With the burst of the dot-com bubble years later, the valuations of these public companies sank, and the stadiums changed its names. The downturn in the number of stadium sponsors had led some observers to speculate about a "naming curse," the hit a company's stock took when it buys naming rights to a stadium.
With the vast amount of public companies using their excess cash for massive stock buyback programs, the idea of executives seeing their company's name in lights has once again surfaced. How quickly will universities cash the check?
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