Donors

It's only anonymous to the public. I imagine the donor and the university are in frequent direct contact.

Are they, or is it just your imagination?

Edit: ah, just your imagination.
- Have you never donated to a "charitable" cause before? You can usually talk to them and ask to not have your name released. There's no legal requirement for name disclosure so it's up to the institution's policy.
  
  Yes, I've donated plenty, and typically anonymously, since I'm not trying to use others to advance a personal agenda.
  
  Non-disclosure would be something quite different from anonymity.

Is it hard to conceive of agreeing to something behind closed doors and donating anonymously to hide the tracks?

Is it hard to suggest that in a less condescending manner?

"i'll give you 100 million dollars on the condition that $X of it be spent on ______" is how it's exerting influence

But if it's actually anonymous, how is that communicated?

Edit: mad that you got no answer, eh?
- Letter, fax, pager, smoke signal, Morse code, tin cans with string, eye blinking code, using the first letter of each word in a New York times obituary, carrier pigeon, skywriting... hmm... wait couldn't they just say it out loud to each other? In person?
  
  Good to know you're remaining as condescending as possible.
  
  You're bring an astounding level of naivety to the discussion, it should be a demonstration of how people that refuse to think can be led like sheep.
  
  Hard to take anything seriously from someone whose vast majority of comments are on pornography. Did you forget to switch accounts?
  
  What precisely does any of my post history have to do with you not understanding even the simplest concept of how corruption works? Does everyone speak honestly, confess their sins and never look at porn in your idyllic world? You're getting angry on the internet, maybe it's time to let your carer take the computer back?
  
  You're the one who seems to be getting angry, bud. Time for another wank?
- lol there is one person in this whole thread who's getting mad, but it's not me
  
  and yes, as someone else said, it's no big deal for someone to contact the business office of an institution and offer money on the condition of anonymity and other conditions. and the business people say okay, forms are filled out and signed, and money is transferred. they want to be anonymous because they don't want all the other institutions calling them asking for money too. and/or they don't want the world to know they're the ones influencing the school's spending
  
  no one wants donors to be able to influence whoever they're donating to. but that's how reality works
  
  Yeah, Coldcell is having a real hissy fit.
  
  If the identity is known, it's not anonymous, it's undisclosed. That would be an entirely different thing.
- It sounds like the university called it "anonymous donor" for PR reasons whilst it is in fact "undisclosed donor".
  
  Your point only makes sense if indeed the donor was genuinelly anonymous (I.e. even the University had no idea who they were) rather than merely described as anonymous by the University for the purpose of divulging it to the outside world.
  
  So my only mistake was not assuming that the university was lying.
  
  You didn't made a mistake, IMHO.
  
  Nobody made a mistake.
  
  There was just a mistmatch between your unvoiced assumptions and those of other people posting here, so all of you were really just starting from different points and hence going in different directions.
  
  I suppose many downvoters might have assumed you were purposefully taking a specifically literal interpretation of "anonymous" in this context for the purpose of defending the University whilst I myself just went with it being a perfectly valid explanation until proven otherwise that you're just a more literal person than most.
  
  This is why I went for writting a post which I believed would provide some clarity rather than downvoting your posts.
  
  As I see it your points were valid for an interpretation that the University and the article used "anonymous" in the most honest of ways (meaning, "unknown to others") and other posters pointers were valid for an interpretation that the University and the article used "anonymous" in a deceitful way that didn't match the dictionary definition but instead meant "unknown to the general public", something for which the correct word is "undisclosed".