Education: Whose $3,800,000?

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The descendant of a Pilgrim last week turned out to be—unwillingly enough—an Indian giver.

With pride, pomp and publicity, Princeton Alumnus ('30) Shelby Collum Davis got all set to give his alma mater $3,800,000. A rich New York investment banker, Davis, 52, proposed to endow Old Nassau with two new history chairs in honor of his late father (Princeton '86). But when Donor Davis arrived at the bank with a platoon of lawyers to wrap up the gift for happy Princeton President Robert F. Goheen. his big gesture collapsed. The money was not his to give.

The money was in a trust fund for his daughter Diana—a fund which Banker Davis started with a $4,000 investment when she was born 22 years ago. (Another $3,800,000 fund is in trust for Son Shelby, 24.) Diana, who has had full legal right to the money since the age of 20, not only refused to sign over her trust to Princeton but never even showed up at the bank. Said she: "He's just doing all this for his own glory."

A descendant of John Alden, and a man who dotes on his purebred lines, Banker Davis was so furious that he ordered his public relations firm to deluge New York newspapers with a five-page release denouncing his daughter and mourning the loss to Princeton. Diana already has "an assured $30,000-a-year income for life and a $100,000 cash gift," said Davis. He could "only attribute her unreasonable selfishness to the unrealistic materialism prevalent among American youth of today." When he some day asks Son Shelby to relinquish his own trust, added Davis, who knows a thing or two about materialism, he hopes the lad will show "more understanding of his responsibility to society."

Diana retorted that the "assured" life income and cash gift was news to her. Papa's pressure about the fund, she said, was actually caused by her engagement to a schoolteacher, John Means Spencer, of whom Davis disapproves, even though the young man is a distant relative of Winston Spencer Churchill. Said Diana, who herself intends to be a schoolteacher: "I hate to say this about my own father, but he is inclined to be somewhat authoritarian."