A Question of Trustworthiness

SUPPOSE YOU GAVE Harvard a forest and about a million dollars to make sure Harvard could take care of it. Then suppose Harvard got sick of having the forest and decided to sell-it-bar wanted to keep your money and spend it somewhere else.

As sleazy as it sounds, that's exactly what the University is proposing to do with $2.5 million which funds the 3800-acre Harvard Black Rock Forest in Cornwall, N.Y. Under a proposed sale agreement released last month. Harvard would sell the site--which was donated to the University by Dr. Ernest G. Stillman '08 in 1950--for $400,000 to a consortium of about 12 non-profit it educational and recreational institutions. In a fit of generosity, the University would offer the consortium a one-time donation of $50,000 once the deal is cut. But Harvard would end up walking away with $2.8 million while abandoning any obligation to cover the forest's yearly operating costs of $60,000 to $70,000.

The crux of the dispute centers around what exactly Stillman had in mind when he established the roughly $1.2 million trust in 1940. John S. Stillman '40, his son and the executor of his estate, contends that his father and Harvard agreed that the trust would finance Black Rock, with any surplus going to the Harvard Forest in Petersham, Mass. The younger Stillman concedes that there are no written, legal contracts to this effect, but claims his father had extensive correspondence and numerous oral agreements with Harvard President James B. Conant '14 and Treasurer Paul Cabot '21 where that was made clear. However, because Harvard rules require that Corporation correspondence and records be kept secret for 50 years, it will be 1990 before Stillman can gain access to the documents which would show the money was intended to go with the Black Rock Forest.

For their part, Harvard lawyers say the agreement was not that specific--that while Stillman did intend his money to see to Black Rock's upkeep, what he really wanted to support was Harvard forestry generally. In this context, they explain, the plan to shift the $2.4 million to the Petersham account is entirely ethical. Harvard's attorneys also consider the trust, which was established in 1940, and the forest, which was transferred to Harvard in June, 1950, six months after Stillman dies, technically separate gifts, and say the University has no responsibility to keep the money and the forest together.

Without access to sealed Corporation documents, it is difficult to know whether Harvard agreed to link the endowment to the Black Rock Forest. But certainly the University's shoddy treatment of Black Rock over the last 15 years--including efforts to dump the property entirely--fall to offer reassurance that their explanation is entirely on the level. The forest was the source of another major controversy in 1973 when Consolidated Edison, which had had its eye on the forest since the mid-1960s, unsuccessfully sought to buy and flood 340 acres of Black Rock as part of the later abandoned Storm King Mountain hydroelectric power plant. Harvard appointed a committee to look into whether the land should be sold and, in January 1973, which drew up a report detailing the potential environmental nightmares which Storm King would have created--but advised Harvard "not to oppose" selling the land to Con Ed. Only after vigorous protests from environmentalists and students--2000 of whom in February signed a petition blasting the proposed sale--did Harvard back down.

Moreover, while Harvard in 1982-83 earned some $130,000 on Black Rock's endowment, it refused to spend money to fix up a road leading into the park and instead asked a local fishing club which uses the land for volunteers to do the job. It also appears that Harvard may have siphoned income from the account. While the Black Rock trust grew from $1.2 million in 1940 to $2.49 million in 1983 under Harvard's stewardship, the rest of the endowment increased more than eight times, to $2.5 billion.

There's nothing wrong with Harvard trying to sell the Black Rock land. Faced with how to dispose of a property that is inconvenient for Harvard--which conducts virtually all of its limited forestry work at the nearer, better maintained Petersham site--but immensely valuable to schools and organizations nearby, the University is taking care to transfer it into good hands, and is including numerous safeguards in the sale agreeement to protect the integrity of the land.

Except the most important one By keeping the $2.5 million kitty for itself, Harvard is stabbing Stillman in the back. Stillman chose to donate the forest, a mountainous plot on the Hudson River which sports a reservoir and six ponds, to Harvard partially because he was fond of the University. But Stillman mostly chose Harvard because he thought he could trust the University to care for the land and provide the necessary stable environment for forestry and botany experiments. Now Harvard would pull out the money to keep the site in proper shape, and the consortium would have to already endowed so that everyone could use it for free.

The University now faces an investigation by the New York Attorney General to see if its attempt to keep the endowment, which is linked to the forest, is legal. And Stillman's son and another Hudson Valley environmentalist are threatening a lawsuit if the University doesn't back down.

We hope it doesn't have to come to that. If Harvard is dead-set on proving that it can shuck its responsibility for the forest, it should produce the documents which show that retaining the $2.5 million endowment is in keeping with the letter--and the spirit--of the original agreement. But right now, most signs seem to indicate that the University has an obligation to turn over the endowment Stillman hoped would preserve his gift.