Yet another development on the “Good Money from Not-So-Good Benefactors” front:  According to the Coal Tattoo blog, members of the West Virginia University student chapter of the Sierra Club presented a petition yesterday to President Clements signed by 1,100 faculty, staff, students and Morgantown residents urging him to reject future donations from coal CEOs Bob Murray and Don Blankenship and demanding that the faculty chair funded by Murray be named for the people who died in the Crandall Canyon Mining disaster, rather than the person whose negligence caused their deaths.

While I am generally sympathetic to the Sierra Club cause, I think their opposition to these gifts is wrong-headed.  In my perfect world, West Virginia University, which actually has a competitive advantage in the field of energy research, would become a leader in the alternative and renewable energy fields.  To do that, they need money from people in the energy industry – and for good or ill, that includes people like Murray and Blankenship, who at least understand the potential benefits of energy research, even if their statements about global warming and other issues are far afield.

It would be great if higher education institutions never took money from benefactors who did not-so-good things, but we wouldn’t have some of the world’s finest educational institutions without the benefit of some ill-gotten gains – Duke University (built by tobacco), Carnegie Mellon University, and Rockefeller University, just to name a few.