True gifts are free of obligation

This week, when people were still trying to figure out what happened and what the next four years will bring, the story got around that a donor to the University of Hawaii-Manoa art department was pulling his support — that is, his money — because he disagreed with how the department chairwoman organized a protest against Trump after the election.

The Associated Press ran the story. ABC News ran a story. The New York Times ran a story.

You know what? This is good news all around. Everybody wins.

Money that has such sensitive strings attached to it isn’t a donation at all. If it comes with expectations, then it’s a payment for services, and unless there is a formal contract, things can get tangled pretty quickly. It’s a good thing nobody involved has to keep working that way.

From the donor’s perspective, why give money to someone who angers you, right? His money, his prerogative. He can do with it what he wants.

The rest of us, those for whom a $100 donation feels like a big commitment, might believe that when the check leaves our hand, it isn’t our money anymore, and we just hope and trust that it will be used in positive ways. Here’s 20 bucks, sir. Now please go buy a sandwich and not a 40-ounce Schlitz. But maybe when you have more zeros on the check, you have expectations of how much control your money buys.

The incident provides an important life lesson for the students of the art department. True art is free of obligations. Financial backing that comes with strings attached is not the same as support or patronage. It’s commerce, and though there is nothing wrong with commercial art, it is not fine art and every artist knows the difference.

The strings attached to artistic patronage are like the strings on a puppet, holding it up and controlling its movement — and not a cool, handmade, intricate folk-art puppet, either.

And how about a hearty “Right on!” for the University of Hawaii for standing up for free speech on campus and backing up its professor? Hawaii’s largest university is famously strapped for cash.

What an honorable and righteous thing to stand in support not with a donor, but with an educator and the students who chose to participate in the demonstration.

True, $14,000 is not eye-popping money (the donor, Mark Blackburn, said it was $40,000), but it’s a bigger hit than Uncle Richard pulling his annual $50 tax-deductible donation because he didn’t like getting stuck in Aloha Stadium parking lot traffic on homecoming night.

It does seem symbolic of the times that money would be used to argue a point against free speech, occurring on the same week that Trump rounded up journalists and berated them as liars.

Trump has talked of loosening libel laws to make it easier to sue those who write “hit pieces” on him. Talk of curtailing the First Amendment is decidedly un-American. But at UH it all worked out.

Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.