University of Michigan alumni Mark Bernstein and his wife, Rachel Bendit, never asked that a new multicultural building on campus be named for them in exchange for a $3 million gift toward its construction, the Detroit Free Press reports.

Last week, the university announced that Bernstein, chair of the university's board of regents, and Bendit had pulled their gift after they began to hear from students, faculty, and staff who were upset that their gift would result in the name of William Monroe Trotter being removed, per U-M's standard procedures, from the existing multicultural center — the only building on the U-M campus named after an African American. According to the Free Press, Bernstein and Bendit will look for other ways to support multiculturalism on the Ann Arbor campus.

Trotter, who was involved in the creation of the NAACP and later the National Equal Rights League, was a longtime newspaper editor and civil rights activist and led protests against the release of the play The Clansman and D.W. Griffith's movie The Birth of a Nation, which was adapted from The Clansman.

"When we realized that [the gift] was not necessary for the building to be built, and hearing from people on campus about their concerns, we decided to restart the process," Bernstein said in a statement released late last week. "We have never sought to put our name on anything at the university. The bulk of our philanthropy we have done privately. We wanted to make this gift as a public statement of our commitment to this important issue. We appreciate this is an enormously complicated issue and situation. We wanted to show that we, as white Jewish leaders, are very supportive of the work being done."