An understandable error! Most people cannot comprehend/believe that one university’s endowment is over fifty billion dollars; and Harvard will be at one hundred billion before you know it, which will be that much harder to assimilate as a reality.
Even a New York Times opinion writer (plus, UD assumes, a bunch of editors who reviewed her column) finds herself rendering a reasonably large endowment as an amount in the hundreds of millions, rather than as an amount exceeding the GDP of 120 nations.
Here’s a simple trick to help you remember: Just repeat aloud ten times FIFTY BILL FIFTY BILL with a stress on the b.
The second most radical option would be for the Ivy League to abolish what is called “ALDC” — athletics, legacy, dean’s list and children of faculty and staff. Forty-three per cent of Harvard’s intake come from one of these groups. The first, athletics, includes sports that can only be learned by the privileged, such as lacrosse, sailing and rowing. The generous athletics intake by universities is why so many recent admission corruption scandals, such as the FBI’s Varsity Blues sting operation, involved athletics directors. Contrary to popular opinion, most athletics scholars are not black basketball players. Sixty-five per cent are white.
This is in the Financial Times, all of whose readers, one assumes, passionately disagree with these options.
And then there’s the author, Edward Luce himself!
Harvard’s goal of a one hundred billion dollar endowment is in serious jeopardy this morning, as outside pressure on the Kennedy School threatens to alienate donors. The school denied a fellowship to a distinguished human rights advocate for fear that his critical remarks about Israel would offend Jewish benefactors, which would in turn significantly set back the Hundred Bill. for Harvard! campaign. But free speech advocates are fighting back in defense of the controversial candidate for the fellowship.
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Lord knows why anyone is critical of Israel.
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Harvard’s response to the controversy has been quick. “We’re already well on our way to 55 billion,” commented Gerald Symington, head of the HBH campaign, “and doubling that is far from an impossible dream. Imagine what just one school with a modest enrollment could do with that sort of money! We can’t afford to let Israel critics derail us from our dream.”
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Oh, okayyyyy…. We’ll give him the fellowship after all. But he better watch his mouth!
But that was 2019. Little Oberlin’s endowment currently stands at $1.09 billion.
A few years ago, Oberlin College did a hell of a lot of damage to a local bakery – falsely accused it of racism, got tons of people to boycott it – and a jury’s decision that it pay the bakery $33 million in compensation doesn’t sit at all well with the school. But the decision has been upheld; the school’s only option at this point is to kick things up to the Ohio Supreme Court… or hey, maybe the US Supreme Court would like to air, for the nation and the world, a billion dollar school’s vicious attack on a local small business.
Let’s wait and see what Oberlin decides to do. Not paying will expose it to yet further penalties, one assumes; so it can’t do nothing forever. I’m figuring an Ohio court at any level will share the outrage of an Ohio jury in regard to the arrant vileness of Oberlin’s behavior. I doubt the Supreme Court would look at the case. And, you know, Oberlin has enough money in its endowment to pay what it owes.
It’d be nice if they concluded something humane and useful for themselves as a result of all of this, but that ain’t gonna happen. Mob rule will prevail.
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UD thanks David.
And indeed I have covered some of the most obnoxious; but let us consider more pleasant things. Curtis Institute, the school that educated the unearthly Yuja Wang, just got an anonymous $20 million donation.
Anonymous: How about that? And given so that the world can be more musical. How about that.
… you can be forgiven for special admissions procedures for the children of big donors.
It appalls her, and if you put endowment in her search engine, you’ll find years of UD being appalled.
These endowments are a classic rich-get-richer phenom, in which a hedgie, say, decides the best thing to do with his or her hundreds of millions of dollars is to give them to Harvard, so that Harvard’s endowment can go from $35 billion to $35 billion plus. To make matters worse, schools like Harvard hoard their endowments.
You don’t have to be Peter Singer to know that this is an unconscionable use of money.
Malcolm Gladwell has begun podcasting about how disgusting it is that “the biggest donations go to institutions that already have endowments larger than some countries’ gross domestic products.” Good.
And there’s more.
Conservatives are footing the bill for taxes that Planned Parenthood, a nonprofit, doesn’t pay — while liberals are making up revenue lost from the National Rifle Association. I could go on. In short, the exemption-and-deduction regime has grown into a pointless, incoherent agglomeration of nonsensical loopholes, which can allow rich organizations to horde plentiful assets in the midst of poverty.
Readers who’d like to (re)visit UD‘s long-running amazement that Harvard University, sitting on close to 36.4 billion dollars (No, that’s silly. That’s crazy. “[W]hen it comes to these fancy universities the official endowment figures are a drastic understatement of the real wealth of the university. Harvard’s real-estate assets are mind-bogglingly valuable, for example, but not part of the endowment.“), continues to enjoy non-profit benefits, can click on the category harvard: foreign and domestic policy. You’ll find it at the bottom of this post.