Princeton's records show that over a 20 year period only 200 of the 1,720 students who received master of public administration degrees - fewer than 12 percent of the enrollment - went into the jobs the Robertsons specified. That comes to $1.25 million for each graduate. The cost of a college education has not gone up that much, even at Princeton.

The Robertson heirs are particularly aggrieved that 13 million of their dollars paid for the construction of Wallace Hall, which the Woodrow Wilson School shares with the Sociology Department, the Office of Population Research and the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing.

Insulting the benevolence, the university now wants to fold the Robertson Foundation into its $8.3 billion endowment (the third largest university endowment, after Harvard's and Yale's). Princeton insists it can keep the family endowment separate, no doubt in the manner in which they treated the rest of the money.

The university argues that its four trustees have followed the letter of the law. The Robertson family argues that it failed the spirit of the law as envisioned by their parents. Before Charles Robertson died in 1981, he wrote to Princeton of his disappointment in the university's failure to encourage and support students to pursue his ideals.

In 1996, Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and a visiting professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, described the graduate program as an "intellectual hodgepodge despite all the resources committed, without clear focus or professional mission."

The fulfillment of the goals of the Robertsons is as crucial today as it was when they initiated them. The war against terror requires educated men and women to enter government service. This is not a liberal or a conservative issue, but it is an ethical one of national interest.

The courts will ultimately decide whether Princeton failed to honor its word to the Robertsons, and the precedent will send a loud message to potential benefactors over how (or whether) they should extend their generosity to universities.