UNH Uses $1 Million of Alum and Former Librarian's $4 Million Donation for a Football Video Scoreboard

Occasionally, a story comes along that hits every cliche note and every trope about college athletics that it seems like it's just too stereotypical to be true. It reaffirms your notions of the depravity universities twist themselves into just for the sake of a shiny football program or just elicits another tired eyeroll.

Today, we have the University of New Hampshire to thank for that.

Last year, the school (Go Wildcats!) received a $4 million donation from an alum and former librarian on campus who left them the money in his estate. Based on all the reports about him after his death, he seemed like a genuinely nice guy who saved his money and gave it back to his alma mater and long-time employer. He had just one condition: $100,000 had to be spent on the library where he worked. That left $3.9 million to reportedly go to "funding scholarships and renovations."

Well, $2.5 million went to renovating the career center, which is great. But another million dollars went to building a video scoreboard for the football stadium that was just renovated to the tune of $25 million. The scoreboard, we're sure, is really tasteful and delightful and will show the best ads during their Division I-AA games. Go Wildcats!

Obviously this hasn't been met with much positive reaction. One alum detailed nearly every problem, deficiency, and institutional issue that was not addressed by that $1 million in this story and it's a long list of oversights of things that colleges actually should be providing and spending on. These include piss-poor conditions in the art department that can barely keep running, and huge budget cuts to all student publications that may wipe them out entirely.

UNH's rebuttal has been tepid and lacking. "Unrestricted gifts give the university the ability to use the funds for our highest priorities and emerging opportunities," the VP of the UNH Foundation told the alum. A $1 million scoreboard for a stadium that was renovated and re-opened five days ago seems like just the type of high-priority, emerging opportunity for a program with a football field inside a running track.

The school also started pushing some ad-hoc rationalizations of the librarian turning into a football fan while living in a nursing home the last year-and-a-half of his life—which seems like a craven reasoning you create to prop up an argument you probably know doesn't have much foundation. And the press release that announced the donation is now no longer available on the school's site.

Anyway, go Wildcats!