Colleges as "final resting places"?? (Are they this strapped for funding?)

[Nikki Stone1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/18/education/18campus.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


Colleges Offering Campuses as Final Resting Places

RICHMOND, Va. — Want to recapture those undergraduate years? Colleges and universities are offering the chance — for eternity.
Jay Paul for The New York Times

Richmond’s columbarium has 3,000 niches, of which 100 have been sold since its completion in 2001.
For a few thousand dollars, the University of Richmond and a half-dozen other universities are giving alumni and faculty the opportunity to have their ashes maintained on campus in perpetuity.

Three more universities — Notre Dame, the Citadel and Hendrix College — are building similar memorials, known as columbaria.

“It seems really off the wall on first blush to most people,” said Richard W. Trollinger, who was involved in the creation of one at Centre College, a liberal arts college in Danville, Ky. “Why on earth would a university create a columbarium?”

The answer is simple, Mr. Trollinger and other college officials say. In an era when many people are highly mobile and do not settle in one place for long, a college can have a strong allure as a final resting place, they say. And officials point out that colleges have a special resonance for many people, who have forged life-long relationships as undergraduates...

For the universities, memorial walls can serve other purposes, although officials are often reluctant to talk about them. A columbarium, by building stronger bonds with alumni and their families, might lead eventually to substantial donations.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Sweet Briar College has done it already.

For an appropriate stipend, you can be buried on Memorial Hill, near Daisy Williams and her parents and grandfather. Daisy's mother bequested the Virginia plantation to start an independent women's college in memory of her daughter.

While I understand the rationale, I also find this phenomenon to be reminiscent of the bidding war in Easthampton for a cemetery plot next to Jackson Pollack. Status symbols in where you are buried.

[Spinzonner]

2. Are the plots graded ?

Is there a GPA requirement ?

"Sorry, you're too stupid or lazy to be buried here"

[no_hypocrisy]

8. It's more like "'How much' do you LOVE Sweet Briar?" in the pecuniary-financial sense.

You'd be surprised how many estates contain a bequest to the college. SBC is just cashing in on another development product.

I guess alumnae don't get the same kick have a laboratory named after them or their husbands.

[Secular Agent Man]

3. Wouldn't this make them places of higher urning?

Sorry...:+

[Nikki Stone1]

4. Rimshot.

:D

[fortyfeetunder]

5. A wee bit bizarre, indeed

Probably good for those (pardon the pun) of the die-hard alumni...

[Nikki Stone1]

6. ::Groan::

This story is bringing out more than its share of really bad puns...

[SocratesInSpirit]

7. Heh

The University of Connecticut already has a graveyard - two graveyards, actually. They were there before the school was established in 1881. The school's founders, Charles and Augustus Storrs, are buried in one of them.