Dodgy Donors Embarrass Scholars

It should have been the culmination of a sparkling redesign for New Mexico University's campus: the Hibben Center for Archaeological Studies. Built using a £3.5 million donation from Frank Hibben, a renowned American archaeologist, the institute was created to give a final flourish to the university's plans to become a leading centre of research on Homo sapiens.

Then officials discovered an uncomfortable fact. Hibben, who died last year, may have done striking research on ancient Americans, but he was better known among colleagues for his decades-long habit of forging research results. As archaeologist Vance Haynes told the journal Nature: 'He thought that it didn't hurt to make the evidence a little better.'

For example, in 1946 he described a site at Chitna Bay in Alaska at which he claimed to have found 10,000-year-old flints. Subsequent expeditions revealed that the site simply did not exist.

Today, faking archaeological evidence is simply known as hibbenising. 'Some think Hibben's work is all faked,' archaeologist Bruce Huckell said. 'Others think we don't have enough information to know.'

Either way, the naming of the new centre after a scientific twister is a major blow for a university seeking academic excellence and world renown. Renaming it could prove tricky, however. It was Hibben who provided funding for the centre.

Neither is the problem confined to New Mexico. An investigation by Nature magazine has revealed that as more and more US universities look to private donors to help them, increasing numbers of benefactors - whose names are being given to prestige buildings - are turning out to have very shaky and embarrassing pasts.

Take Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. Thankful for his donations, the university named a recreation building after local businessman Robert Brennan. Last year workers had to scrape his name from the building following Brennan's conviction for fraud.

Or consider the case of land magnate Kemper Marley. His family made a $6m contribution to Arizona University so that its agricultural science department could be named in his honour. But Marley is also known as the reputed mastermind of the 1976 murder of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter. Many university academics still refuse to enter the building.

Similarly, the University of Missouri-Columbia is currently stuck with a professorship named after Kenneth Lay, late of Enron, while at the University of Michigan the medical centre and architecture college carry the name of graduate Alfred Taubman, the fallen and disgraced former chairman of Sotheby's auction house.

These examples are causing increasing unrest among academics both in America and in Europe, and in particular Britain, where pressure is mounting on universities to raise increasing amounts of money from private benefactors. Where will it end, they ask?

'There is a touching moment at the end of the film The Shawshank Redemption when the prison's library is named after inmate Brooks Hatlen,' said one academic. 'They were lucky. At least, they knew in advance that their candidate was a crook.'