Believe it or not, the cavalier attitude that colleges and universities take towards donors can bite the left too. “On most issues, Robert Novak and Jane Fonda have nothing in common,” author Martin Morse Wooster writes in the Foundation Watch newsletter. “But on the issue of donor intent in universities, they are on the same side.” Foundation Watch is a publication of the Capital Research Center, where Wooster is a senior fellow.

“In 2001, Fonda donated $6.5 million and pledged an additional $6 million to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to establish the Harvard Center on Gender and Education,” Wooster reported in the April 2009 issue of Foundation Watch. “Dissatisfied with the progress towards the establishment of the center, Fonda in 2003 cancelled the $6 million pledge and persuaded Harvard to give back the $6.5 million she had already spent.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.