Faced with a drastic decline in public funding, it’s understandable that state universities are looking at all sorts of ways to raise private money. However, putting a specific price tag on the naming rights for a state university school or even a single building, could set a dangerous precedent.

In what he called “a bold thing,” H. David Wilson, the new dean of the KU School of Medicine in Wichita, made public this week his offer to name the entire school after anyone who donated $100 million to the institution. Admittedly, the pool of people who could possibly make that kind of donation is extremely small, but it probably includes at least a few people whose name Kansas wouldn’t want attached to its state medical school.

Have Kansas officials forgotten the “Paige Sports Arena” fiasco at the University of Missouri? When Bill and Nancy Laurie, heirs to the Wal-Mart fortune, donated $25 million toward a building campaign for the new MU arena, they received naming rights and decided to dedicate the building to their daughter, Paige. Within weeks of the arena’s opening, however, Paige’s former roommate at the University of Southern California revealed that she had been paid about $20,000 over more than three years to write papers and complete other classwork for Paige. Confronted with the information that their daughter had cheated her way through college, the Lauries forfeited their naming rights and the building was renamed Mizzou Arena.

And Paige Arena isn’t the only naming problem faced by MU. There also was the matter of the $1.1 million donated in 1999 to endow the “Kenneth L. Lay Chair in International Economics.” Lay, the former chairman and CEO of Enron, later was convicted of fraud and conspiracy in the scandal that brought down the company. Lay died within two months of the verdict, and the convictions were wiped out, but some taint obviously lingered. MU had a little trouble filling the endowed chair but appointed its first Kenneth L. Lay Chair in April 2008.

KU supporters tend to revel in Missouri’s misery, but there may be a lesson to be learned from their mistakes. Various KU buildings bear the names of people who earned that honor because of their accomplishments: Allen Fieldhouse, Strong Hall, Snow Hall, etc. The William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications is an example of a school that was named not for a donor, but for the state’s most famous journalist.

Some buildings, like the Spencer Library and Spencer Museum of History, are named for well-known philanthropists whose work and reputations reflect well on the university. A number of athletic facilities also have been named for donors who — knock on wood — haven’t attracted much negative attention for the university.

It seems, however, that a note of caution is due. If KU officials are going to put naming rights up for sale, they may need to attach some conditions or caveats to the deal. A $100 million gift certainly would be a boon to the KU medical school, but it’s hard to predict the future consequences of attaching just about any donor’s name to a critical academic unit.