True, Halsey imploded before UVA could make him, like Cohen at Brown, a trustee. And true, Cohen’s ten billion dollar personal fortune puts Minor – who used to have two billion but is currently bankrupt ($100 million in debts; only $50 million to pay them — we’ve all been there) – to shame. But both men are big presences, big benefactors, at these two universities; and as both men fall apart, the universities look rather like Elinor in Sense and Sensibility, who laments to her sister that humiliation was “forced upon me by the very person whose prior claims ruined all my hopes.” (In Elinor’s case that would be a romantic rival, while in the present matter we are talking about creditors.)
Now, Cohen is far from bankrupt, but it’s pretty clear that his firm’s way-serious legal problems are emptying his hedge fund a mile a minute; and just as Minor’s pledged twenty-five million dollar gift to UVA seems to have disappeared, I’m thinking that any amazing largesse of that sort Cohen might have been contemplating in relation to Brown is similarly imperiled.