It was a little more than 106 years ago that New London threw a big party and thousands turned up, celebrating with trumpets blaring and firecrackers snapping, to mark the successful completion of a $100,000 campaign organized to fund the establishment of a new women's college in the city.

Beating out 20 other towns, including Groton and Waterford, New London had succeeded in winning a statewide competition to host what was to become Connecticut College.

This Sunday, the school will celebrate its 99th commencement, just a few days after a commencement across Route 32 at the Coast Guard Academy, which is to feature President Donald Trump and attendant fanfare and protests.

It occurs to me that New Londoners should be equally drawn to protest the commencement ceremonies at Connecticut College, the passing of another academic year during which the rich school has offered next to nothing by way of compensation to its poor host city.

New London entered the contest to lure the state's first women's college when a leading citizen, Percy Coe Eggleston, offered a family farm on a hill at the northern end of the city, which donated $50,000 for the acquisition, a total of 280 acres.

Sealing the deal was a public fundraising campaign with a goal of $100,000 that, in the end, with a sweetener from millionaire Morton F. Plant, raised $134,824.41.

Getting to that goal was a citywide effort, with almost 6,000 of the city's 19,500 residents contributing. Volunteers rang doorbells, children broke open piggy banks and pastors preached education from pulpits.

Fundraising was tracked on a huge clock in front of The Day and a 53-foot-tall thermometer on State Street. Every day at 2 p.m., city business ground to a halt and a fire alarm rang out the number, in thousands of dollars, that had been raised in the previous 24 hours.

It is hard to imagine that an institution like Connecticut College, born in such a spirit of generosity and civic pride, could so thoroughly turn its back on a city that, no longer as prosperous as it once was, still honorably fulfills its host responsibilities.

Connecticut College has been paying New London $12,500 a year since a settlement in 2007 over a dispute on whether some of its buildings are used for commercial, not educational, purposes and therefore taxable.

That deal is coming to an end, and Mayor Michael Passero told me he hopes to negotiate a new amount that might be more fair to the city.

In a time when wealthy schools have been volunteering significant payments in lieu of taxes to the struggling cities that host them, the $12,500 paid here is so small as to be insulting.

Brown University makes $8 million in voluntary payments to Providence and pays another $2.3 million in fees. Yale University makes $8.2 million in voluntary payments to New Haven and pays $4.5 million in taxes on its commercial properties.

Help needn't be just a check. Just this month, Wesleyan is preparing to open a new bookstore in downtown Middletown that is expected to become an economic driver there, a downtown retail anchor.

Connecticut College's endowment of less than $300 million is considerably smaller than Brown's $3 billion. Do the math and Connecticut College, paying a comparable share of its endowment, would still need to add a few hundred thousand dollars more to its payments.

The size of the endowment doesn't seem to be such an important yardstick, when compensating administrators, as it is when used to determine whether to help a poor host city. Connecticut College President Katherine Bergeron, after all, makes just a little less than half the $977,000 salary paid to the president of Yale.

I plugged into an investment calculator the $134,000 that city residents raised back in 1911 to help establish Connecticut College, and got an interesting result.

If residents had conservatively invested that money, instead of donating it to the new college on the hill, they would have $13 million today.

That makes $12,500 a year seem even more insulting.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com