The Faculty Center Issue: Fungibility and Purpose

Yours truly will be posting the audio from the public forum of earlier this evening on the hotel/conference center that was proposed to replace the Faculty Center. That posting won’t happen until tomorrow. (The audio needs to be converted to video and then divided into segments that meet certain technical limits.) However, one issue that came up this evening was the flexibility of use of the Luskin gift. Did the Luskins exclusively want a hotel/conference center along the lines originally proposed? That question was not precisely answered. There were general comments about donors having particular visions.

On March 18, a ceremony honoring the Luskins and their gift in front of the School of Public Affairs, unveiling the new sign on the building renaming the School the Luskin School of Public Affairs. Among the speakers was LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. In the course of his remarks, he referred to the gift as being to Public Affairs and to “the Faculty Center.” No one seemed pained by the latter characterization. No one corrected it. Just a slip of the tongue? A misunderstaning? The Mayor referred to having a conversation with the Luskins prior to the event.

A video of the full remarks of Mayor Villaraigosa are below:

The excerpt from the video above concerning the purpose of the gift is below: