Deep pockets, deep division

URORA - In 2000, Wells College President Lisa Marsh Ryerson faced a dilemma.

The school had a portfolio of failing commercial properties, but also a proprietary interest in continuing that ownership. The school's board of trustees voted to close the Aurora Inn because it had lost a quarter-million dollars the year before. But the college community needed an inn. It also did not want to lose its market, another college property that was in financial trouble.

So Ryerson turned to Pleasant Rowland, an out-of-state alumna who had made $700 million from the sale of the American Girl line of dolls and books. Always a generous contributor to Wells, she had become even more so in the 1990s, when she gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to redecorate the public spaces in many of the campus buildings.