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For Sale: Building Space for Your Name

Got $50 million? Why putting your name on a Harvard building—and elsewhere—is so fun

IT IS A SOURCE OF no small amount of pride in my family that there's a building named in our honor at a college in the Midwest. The institution is no Stanford or Yale, and our structure is hardly the most impressive one at the school. Actually, it isn't even a whole building, but rather a 1,000-square-foot chapel (max capacity 150) located inside a bigger facility with another family name (Kiekhofer) on the outside. Still, it's our chapel, and we know down deep that it's the true jewel of the entire campus.

I confess that...