N.H.: Dead College Donor Used as Football-Marketing Prop

N.H.: Dead College Donor Used as Football-Marketing Prop
University of New Hampshire

People's hearts were warmed when a long-serving University of New Hampshire librarian, upon his death, left the school $4 million. Less noticed was university's troubling decision to funnel only $100,000 of his money to the library -- and $1 million to a video scoreboard for its football stadium. Then the school spun the gift deceptively, connecting its football splurge to a fragment of the dead man's life: watching football at an assisted living facility.


From Deadspin:

Morin didn't tell anyone he was becoming a multi-millionaire, and his lifestyle certainly didn't offer any hints. He drove the sort of car you'd associate with a college student, not a college staffer. He wore the same clothes for decades, until a student worker took him to the mall for a shopping trip. (That same student persuaded him to attend a few of her family holidays.) The only major change came after his mother died in 2004. Morin decided to make UNH the beneficiary of his estate. Mullen asked his client several times if he wanted to alert the university to what was coming or to specify any uses for his donation—some scholarships for the library's student workers, say. Morin would go home and think about it, but in the end he always declined. “I think I'll just leave it as it is,” he told Mullen. …

Morin's room at Brookdale included a working TV, among other amenities, and when football season kicked off in the fall of 2014 he started watching games for the first time. Mullen was shocked when he heard this—sports had never come up during their lunches. “I remember going to visit him and he'd be watching some obscure bowl game,” Mullen says, “Eastern Washington or Southern Illinois or whatever.” Morin never talked to his nurses about football. He didn't follow any particular team. Instead, he immersed himself in the game's components, in its systems and rules—and, yes, as UNH kept chanting after his death, in the names of its players and teams.

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