Giving Compass' Take:

• Terri Lynn Helge shares the story of how Vanderbilt University renamed a building that honored the Confederacy and argues that other charities that have received tainted money - especially from the Sackler family - should follow suit. 

• How can funders help charitable organizations avoid and escape these awkward situations? 

• Learn why not all charities return tainted money. 

Doing what’s morally right sometimes requires taking tough steps in terms of legal ramifications and expenses. But charities caught in this dilemma also face a cost for playing it safe by doing nothing. If prospective students or visitors stay away and other donors decide they’re better off not supporting this particular cause because of its association with a patron seen as toxic, it will be expensive no matter what they do.

Consider what happened at Vanderbilt University when it attempted in 2002 to rename “Confederate Memorial Hall,” a building which it had acquired following a merger with George Peabody College for Teachers in 1979.

Peabody had received a donation of $50,000 from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1933 to fund the building’s construction, with the condition that the building carry the moniker in perpetuity. After Vanderbilt publicly announced that it would remove that tribute to the Confederacy from the building’s name and walls, the organization sued to enforce the terms of its gift agreement.

In 2005, the court ordered the university to reimburse the United Daughters of the Confederacy the value of its original donation, adjusted for inflation, in exchange for the right to rebrand the building.

A decade later, anonymous donors gave Vanderbilt the $1.2 million it took to get rid of what Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos called “a symbol of exclusion, and a divisive contradiction of our hopes and dreams of being a truly great and inclusive university.”

Once the cost of doing nothing gets too high in the long run, charities may implement costly options to terminate the association.

That is why in my view, museums and other recipients of the drug-making family’s philanthropy could eventually redirect their donations. But that won’t happen until what they lose by honoring Sackler gift agreements becomes more exorbitant than satisfying all of the anti-Sackler movement’s demands.

Read the full article about the cost of doing the right thing by Terri Lynn Helge at The Conversation.