The U.S. Senate voted on Thursday, for what appears to be the first time, to strip an individual academic earmark from a spending bill: $2-million to the University of Vermont for an institute honoring former Sen. James M. Jeffords.

The money was included in a $123.2-billion appropriations measure to finance the war in Iraq. Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican and a frequent critic of earmarks, took aim at the Vermont earmark as an example of what he called wasteful spending. And when Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, defended the earmark, the debate got a bit testy.

Mr. Coburn said Vermont’s $282.6-million endowment grew by 16 percent last year, and the resulting income made the university more than able to finance the institute without federal help.

Then he invoked national security. “This $2-million could be spent for our troops. It would buy 2,857 carbine rifles the National Guard presently does not have so they could conduct training. It would buy four mine-protected vehicles or 13 up-armored humvees.”

He also complained that the earmark violated a moratorium on earmarks for 2007 instituted by Congress’s Democratic leadership, and he said the bill would have provided the $2-million by cutting federal expenditures for managing student loans.

Senator Leahy said the institute, on educational research and policy, would honor Senator Jeffords, a Republican turned Independent from Vermont who retired last year, “while there is still time” because Mr. Jeffords’s health is declining. Mr. Leahy added that the institute “is already 100-percent paid for” (raising the question, though, of why an earmark was needed) — “not like the $1-trillion the senator from Oklahoma supports for a needless war in Iraq. ... The U.S. Senate has many important issues to deal with right now. And this is just not one of them.”

The Senate passed Senator Coburn’s amendment to strip the earmark by an unrecorded voice vote. —Jeffrey Brainard