Robertsons poll about endowment

The Robertson family will release results today of a Zogby International poll it commissioned on donations — its latest move in an ongoing lawsuit against the University and others who stand accused of misspending Charles Robertson '26 and Marie Robertson's now $600-million-plus endowment for the Wilson School.

The Zogby poll found that 70.4 percent of voting-age American adults think managers of an organization should be held legally liable if they use a donation "for a purpose other than the one for which it was given" and that 59.3 percent would ask for a misspent donation to be returned in full. The poll's margin of error is 2.9 percent.

"The results of this study should send a very clear and compelling message to donors and recipients that the day of having donations be received and just arbitrarily shifted around an organization is quickly coming to a close," said Bill Robertson '72, son of Charles Robertson and lead plaintiff in the lawsuit. "These institutions must be responsible for donations which have an intent about where they should be spent."

"Since the numbers have turned out to be so overwhelmingly unsympathetic to those who disrespect issues of donor intent, it could be introduced in court," he added.

The poll is the latest move after years of what Doug Eakeley, attorney for the University in the case, said is starting to resemble "a grudge match." In July 2002, the Robertson family sued the University, President Tilghman and the Robertson Foundation's three university-designated trustees, claiming the University did not abide by Charles Robertson's stipulation that the Wilson School use the donation to educate graduate students for careers in the federal government, especially in the Foreign Service.

But Eakeley said the poll results are largely irrelevant.

"The poll results are interesting and Zogby is certainly a good polling firm, but it's almost commonsensical that poll results are dependent upon the questions asked," he said. "The questions asked here have nothing to do with the issues in the litigation, or are tangentially related to the issues in the litigation."

Eakeley added that, contrary to what the Robertsons have said, the original donation wasn't specifically intended to prepare students for government service, which makes it fundamentally different from the more restrictive type of donations mentioned in the poll questions.

But Robertson said the poll results are entirely pertinent to the case, in part because it is safe to assume misappropriation of the donation. "The case has not been tried. However, we believe that they in fact misspent all this money and for all we know they did this secretly. In fact, they positively concealed how they spent this money," Robertson said. "For one to take that leap of faith isn't asking too much."

The poll's 22 questions, most of which Robertson said the family's public relations team authored, focused on how respondents would feel about a charitable organization's misappropriation of donations.

The foundation's chief complaint has been that the Wilson School has "not recruited students to the school who indicated a specific desire in government service. There is very little in this curriculum that focuses on practical experience in holding a position in the federal government," Robertson said.

"When a program was suggested to the school to provide students with incentives to go into the government, regarding student loans or something to that effect, that was rejected by Princeton. Also, in the school, the faculty is of the nature that they're skeptical of the U.S. government and what can be achieved by the U.S. government," he added.

But Eakeley said the lawsuit is "a tragic circumstance of misguided litigation," noting that in the first Wilson School class of MPAs to graduate under current Dean Anne-Marie Slaughter '80, about 87 percent of the graduates with jobs worked in the public or nonprofit sector.

"This is a wonderful record that is as good if not better than any other similarly situated graduate school program," he said.