What's in a name? A lot, at least at two engineering schools in Southern California named after high-tech billionaire and generous donor Henry Samueli.
The Samueli name could be stripped from engineering schools at UCLA and UC Irvine as a result of his recent guilty plea to a felony charge of lying to financial regulators. A review of the issue is being launched by the University of California's general counsel, officials said.
The two engineering schools were named for Samueli after the Broadcom Corp. co-founder and his wife donated a total of $50 million to those programs in 1999. Samueli, who earned his doctorate in electrical engineering at UCLA and is a professor there, is widely admired for his pioneering work in telecommunications microchip technology and his extensive philanthropy.
But his guilty plea last month to making a false statement to federal authorities investigating the alleged backdating of stock options awarded to employees at Irvine-based Broadcom has triggered a review of the name of each school, UC spokesman Brad Hayward said. UC policy on such matters is vague, and questions of timing and what factors should be considered have yet to be determined.
"Quite honestly, this is new territory for us, so we don't have answers to a lot of specific questions at this point," Hayward said. He said he and other UC officials could not recall a case in which a donor's name was removed from a building or program at the university because of a crime.
In this era of corporate scandals, however, other universities have faced similar dilemmas as big donors have gotten into trouble. Schools' responses have included doing nothing, excising names from buildings and returning donations.
It would be an uncommon and drastic step for UC to remove Samueli's name from plaques, brochures and websites and would take much delicate discussion, said Timothy McDonough, spokesman at the American Council on Education, a higher education advocacy group. "These kinds of decisions are a very big deal," he said.
According to rules adopted in 2002, the naming of any UC building or program "must be consistent with the university's role as a public trust." If circumstances "change substantially so that the continued use of that name may compromise the public trust," UC's general counsel must consult with the state's attorney general.
