What’s in a Name? Part 2 - The money behind the names (#563)

In Part 1 of this series, I suggested that naming rights are not really about gratitude.

They’re about identity.

But identity rarely changes on its own.

Identity changes when money changes.

If we want to understand why veterinary colleges are beginning to carry the names of individuals, we must talk about something less romantic and far more practical:

Who pays the bills?

The old model most of us trained in

For much of the twentieth century, veterinary education in the United States followed a relatively stable formula.

Most colleges were:

Publicly funded

State supported

Land-grant in origin

Created to serve regional agricultural and community needs

The implicit contract was simple:

States fund the school.

The school serves the public.

Tuition was manageable. Facilities were modest. Faculty were underpaid but mission-driven.

Nobody expected a billionaire to underwrite the anatomy building.

We simply made do.

When I think back to the schools of the 1970s - the era when many of today’s established colleges opened - they were not architectural statements. They were functional spaces with fluorescent lights, concrete floors, and a lot of heart.

No one asked what the naming rights were worth.

Because there weren’t any.

Then the economics shifted

Over the past two decades, three quiet forces began squeezing veterinary education.

1. Declining public support

State appropriations have steadily fallen as a percentage of university budgets.

Veterinary colleges, which are expensive to run, feel this disproportionately.

Veterinary colleges operate:

Teaching hospitals

Intensive care units

Surgical suites

Imaging centers

Research laboratories

This is not a lecture hall discipline. It’s infrastructure-heavy medicine. And infrastructure is costly.

2. Rising expectations

Clients now expect:

CT and MRI

Interventional procedures

Specialty care

24/7 services

Students expect:

Simulation labs

Modern facilities

Advanced technology

Global opportunities

All reasonable. All expensive.

3. Rapid expansion

To address workforce needs, new programs are opening across the country.

Currently, there are 33 accredited colleges, with many additional schools in development or seeking accreditation.

Each new school requires:

Land

Buildings

Faculty recruitment

Hospitals

Equipment

Accreditation costs

You don’t launch a veterinary college with folding chairs and goodwill.

You launch it with tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars.

And states rarely write checks that large anymore.

The gap someone must fill

When public funding shrinks and costs rise, a gap appears.

Universities have only a few options:

Raise tuition

Cut programs

Seek private philanthropy

No dean wants the first two. So, we pursue the third.

Quietly at first. Then strategically. Then aggressively.

Development offices expand. Advancement teams grow. Capital campaigns become central to survival.

And once philanthropy becomes central, so do negotiations.

Because major gifts rarely come without expectations.

The unspoken exchange

Every large donation involves an exchange, even when nobody says it out loud.

Not corruption.

Not impropriety.

Just reality.

The exchange looks something like this:

Donor: “I’ll fund the building.”

Institution: “How would you like to be recognized?”

At smaller scales, recognition is easy:

A plaque

A room

A scholarship

At larger scales, the conversation shifts:

A hospital wing

A center

An institute

And eventually:

The college itself

At that point, naming becomes currency. Identity becomes negotiable.

Why new schools are especially vulnerable

Established colleges often have history on their side. It’s harder to rename a 100-year-old institution.

But brand-new schools? They are blank slates.

No entrenched identity.

No legacy name.

No alumni tradition.

From a fundraising standpoint, they are opportunities.

If you’re trying to raise $50–$150 million to launch a new veterinary college, the most valuable asset you possess is the only thing big enough to match the gift:

The name.

So it’s not surprising that many of the newly proposed or recently launched schools are the ones most likely to carry donor or advocate names .

For them, naming is not symbolism. It’s capitalization.

A quiet cultural shift

Here’s what fascinates me. None of this happens with fanfare. No one announces:

We are now commodifying our institutional identity.

Instead, the story is framed, understandably, as gratitude:

A generous gift made this possible.

We honor their leadership.

This transformative support advances our mission.

All true. And yet something deeper is also happening.

We move from:

Publicly sustained institutions

to

Philanthropy-dependent institutions

And with that shift, subtle questions emerge:

Who influences priorities?

Which programs get funded?

Which voices matter most?

What happens when donor interests diverge from academic ones?

These aren’t accusations. They’re structural realities that human medicine has wrestled with for decades. Veterinary medicine is just beginning to encounter them.

The emotional complication

There’s also a human side to this that we rarely discuss.

What about:

The thousands of alumni who gave smaller gifts for decades.

The faculty who built programs from scratch.

The communities that supported the school long before the capital campaign.

When a college suddenly carries one person’s name, the message, however unintended, can feel disproportionate.

As if history condensed to a single benefactor.

It’s not that the donor doesn’t deserve thanks.

It’s that institutions are collective achievements.

Naming can sometimes obscure that truth.

My lingering unease

Perhaps this is generational.

I trained in an era when veterinary medicine felt like a shared craft.

More barn-raising than branding.

We didn’t think of our schools as assets to be named.

We thought of them as places that belonged to everyone.

I worry that when names become transactional, something quiet erodes:

A sense of common ownership.

A sense that the school exists first for the profession, not for benefaction.

It’s not a dramatic loss. It’s more like a slow drift.

But culture often changes through small drifts. Not grand decisions.

The tension we now live with

So here we are.

We may genuinely need:

More veterinarians

More schools

More facilities

More funding

And philanthropy can make all of that possible.

Yet the method of securing that support may gradually reshape who we are.

That’s the tension.

Not right versus wrong.

But money versus meaning.

Coming next

Part 3 - Who Gets Remembered? How naming rights affect alumni, faculty, and the quieter contributors who built veterinary education long before major gifts.

Background

On January 28, 2026, the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) announced a record-breaking $120 million donation from Joan and Sanford I. Weill to its School of Veterinary Medicine.

In recognition, the institution was renamed the UC Davis Joan and Sanford I. Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.

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