$700,000 seems low to me. $50,000 invested in a CD, compounded over the last 72 years, would yield a figure in the millions of dollars.
Anyway, Gee's hatchet-man, Michael Schoenfeld, initiated this insanity. He should be fired immediately, and sent back to New York, his true home.
Schoenfeld's cultural purging has alienated most of the old alumni base, and cost Vanderbilt a huge amount of both financial and spiritual support.
A once proud Southern university, whose most famous graduates were the "Fugitive Agrarians"(Robert Penn Warren, Andrew Lytle, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, et al), now finds itself smoldering in the ruins of political correctness.
The Vanderbilt Administration deserves this embarrassment. The vast majority of proud Vanderbilt alumni do not.
If gold was $28 an ounce in those days, it would be about 1786 ounces, or $767,000.