"Luxury is morally repugnant, and its incompatibility with democratic ideals, moreover, has been consistently recognized in the traditions that shape our political culture. The difficulty of limiting the influence of wealth suggests that wealth itself needs to be limited. When money talks, everybody else is condemned to listen. For that reason, a democratic society cannot allow unlimited accumulation. Social and civic equality presuppose at least a rough approximation of economic equality."

One of Soltan’s suggestions for Harvard has been to look at the example of Florida Southern College, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. I guess the suggestion here is to build architectural or artistic marvels for the pleasure of future generations, to make something of lasting beauty. That’s appealing in a way, but it also has a bit of pharonic vanity about it. It doesn’t seem to me to self-evidently outweigh doing more research, hiring more faculty, beefing up administrative capacity, improving most facilities, investing in better infrastructure.

She'd been strangled with a rosary -- not a run-of-the-mill rosary like you might get at a Catholic bookstore where Hail Marys are two for a quarter and indulgences are included on the back flap of the May issue of "Nuns and Roses" magazine, but a fancy heirloom rosary with pearls, rubies, and a solid gold cross, a rosary with attitude, the kind of rosary that said, "Get your Jehovah's Witness butt off my front porch."

Marilyn's main feature was her mountainous breasts, with an associated sharp ravine of cleavage--the breasts not awesome like Everest, but like one of the Highland peaks near Balquhidder, where the notorious outlaw Rob Roy spent his last days.

The moon rose in the east, a thin, yellow sliver like a fingernail ripped off with a jagged edge that goes to the quick and hurts like the dickens, making Selena wince as she looked on from Dirk's strong embrace and, recalling the last time she clutched at something so hard she broke a nail, brooded as she remembered that tomorrow was her annual pap smear.

Karl awoke with a start, his heart pounding away like a drum, not a well mannered tympani such as one might hear in a Boston Pops rendition of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" but rather more like a snare drum in the hands of Terry Bozzio during the time when he was performing with Frank Zappa.

He held her desperately in his arms and stroked her silken hair, and as he drew her full red lips to his, he ravenously smothered her with lots of smooches.

Ruthanne felt as though she was frozen in time, staring into Steve's eyes, deep turquoise pools of Tidy-Bowl blue, reflecting back the deep passionate love that Ruthanne felt in her heart because Steve certainly didn't feel anything, being in a coma as he was, so what Ruthanne had reflected back to herself was what she herself felt, bouncing off Steve's eyes, because there was absolutely zip going on behind those eyes.

"So that was your Earth emotion 'love'," gasped Zyxwlyxgwr Noopar, third in line to the holo-throne of S-6, as he hosed down his trunk and removed the shallots.

Slim pulled the branding iron away from the yearling's seared flank and looked up to see Tuffy Edwards, the boss's daughter, trotting towards him on her sorrel mare, Brandi, wearing absolutely nothing but tight blue jeans and a green tank top---her gi-normous, heaving, unrestrained hooters resembling nothing so much as a pair of fat Charolais heifers trying to beat each other through a loading chute.

The poetry teacher's bullet-riddled body lay sprawled on the verandah floor like a patient etherized upon a table.

'It's hard to feel you're a real man unless you can occasionally misbehave in gratifying ways, but the only departments where this can be done (aside, obviously, from athletics) are business, economics, engineering, and those hard sciences that attract a lot of funding. ... You want to feel you're a player in capitalist sport, but there's just no way to play in English departments. No one cares how badly you abuse the little gifts — the Guggenheim, the weeny grant for two weeks in a room near an Italian lake — that the humanities offer. If, as [Philip] Rieff suggests, the humanities professor is not supplementing his goodie bag with a love of teaching, he's on his way down.'

'Although legal academics have it much better than college professors in so many ways ... there is little love on campus. That's, I think, as it should be among adults — but those of us with Ph.D.'s who decide to teach in vocational schools are often giving up what Deresiewicz calls "erotic intensity." In law school, instrumental rationality finds a way to smother eros in the classroom.'

'Everything in nature springs up, flourishes, dies, springs up again: we do the same. Bodies form and decay all the time. What the spirit does, being outside nature, has the potential to be much more interesting. But since we have forgotten that life, if we ever knew it, we are left with physical dissolution, and we don’t like it much.

Our ancestors were much better at facing this, and, in their sheer melancholy, celebrating it. Consider the lovely “Funeral Sentences” of Henry Purcell, set to the words of Isaiah:

Man that is born of a woman
Hath but a short time to live,
And is full of misery.
He cometh up, and is cut down like a flow’r;
He fleeth as it were a shadow,
And ne’er continueth in one stay.

On “ne’er continueth” Purcell makes the tenors swoop in with all the plangency that beer and late nights and hopeless love can give them. It sums up how much we want to cling to life―and how death, all the same, stalks and claws at us on every side.'

Labels: balinesia

Next Sunday, Lawrence Summers becomes the 27th president of Harvard. But the distance from the Treasury Department to this particular ivory tower is not as great as it once might have been. Summers will have less money to play with than he did in his last job, as treasury secretary, but the endowment of the institution he inherits has climbed in recent months to as much as $19 billion -- a sum greater than the physical assets of McDonald's, the G.D.P. of Ecuador, the net worth of all but 5 of the Forbes 400 or, according to The Boston Globe, the endowment of every nonprofit institution in the world after the Roman Catholic Church. As the head of Harvard, there will be no escaping the burdens of high finance.

Or low. Summers's appointment in April was barely a month old before Massachusetts Hall, which houses his new office, was taken over by dozens of students protesting Harvard's failure to provide a ''living wage'' of $10.25 to all its employees. Over the next 26 days, tents popped up in Harvard Yard, as students, professors and workers slept outside in sympathy. Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, dropped by to show support. Senator Edward Kennedy tried to enter the building to meet with the students, but the police wouldn't allow it. Newspapers across the country ran editorials taking Harvard to task for refusing to spend even the smallest fraction of its endowment to improve the lives of its workers. [Recall that Summers did find tens of millions of dollars to save the ass of one particular Harvard worker -- his friend Andrei Shleifer, an economics professor whose corrupt dealings in Russia drew ginormous federal penalties to Harvard.] Drawings of Summers as Marie Antoinette began to go up around Harvard Yard.

If the issues of the protest are small for such a rich and enormous institution -- about 400 employees and several hundred contract workers are affected by the university's position, which it has pledged to reconsider -- they call attention to a growing chorus of critics [Note, for instance, Harvard's way shitty alumni giving rate.] who believe that Harvard is at least squandering an opportunity to rethink its culture, or even its mission, in light of that one stunning number: $19 billion. (The next largest endowment, Yale's, is $10 billion.) [If $19 billion is stunning, I guess 30 is what Christopher Hitchens would call funny like a heart attack.]

''It's absurd,'' says Reich, who has taught at Harvard. ''There's no reason to raise a giant endowment merely for the sake of having a giant endowment.'' [This is the anal implosivity problem about which UD has recently written.] Jeffrey Sachs, a Harvard economics professor, is a bit more philosophical: ''We all have the sense that this is a remarkable amount of money. The question is, To what purpose will it be put?''



Harvard surely wouldn't lack for recommendations if it wanted them. Frank Newman, the director of the higher education policy program at the Pew Charitable Trusts and the former president of the University of Rhode Island, notes that universities receive favorable tax treatment because society expects them to be ''above and beyond corporate citizenship, to take the steps that help make society better.'' He suggests that Harvard spend more money to mentor minority students or to study such national issues as the health-care system. Sachs says that Harvard should ''increase the knowledge capacity'' in the developing world; Reich talks about Harvard ''replicating itself'' both globally and nationally. Todd Plants, who graduated from the college two weeks ago and was the chairman of the Student Affairs Committee last year, argues for more financial aid. (And you can see his point: tuition, room and board for the last four years cost $126,486, which more than a third of this year's 1,602 graduates paid in full.) [UD has some ideas along these lines too. See her Inside Higher Ed post, Help Harvard Spend its Endowment.]

But Harvard has been reluctant to think creatively about its increased wealth. Last fall, for example, at a meeting of the Harvard Management Company board, which oversees the investment of the university's endowment, one member posed an intriguing question: Do we want to be fully endowed? At the time, Harvard's endowment was paying out enough income to cover 27 percent of the university's $2 billion operating budget. Would it be worthwhile to try to cover the whole thing? To make the school free to all 18,000 students? To liberate its 2,000 professors from grant writing to concentrate on teaching and research? The question was a nonstarter, says Elizabeth Huidekoper, Harvard's vice president for finance. The conversation ''didn't quite go that far.''

In January, Princeton (endowment: $8.4 billion) promised to abolish student loans. In April, Cornell (endowment: $3.4 billion) said it would open a medical school campus in the tiny Persian Gulf nation of Qatar. But the three largest nonannual expenditures of the outgoing president Neil Rudenstine's tenure capture Harvard's conservative approach when it comes to innovative spending: the purchase of 29 developed acres up the Charles River in Watertown for $168 million; the purchase of 48 developed acres across the river in Allston for $150 million; and the costs of formally merging with nearby Radcliffe for another $150 million. Ask about satellite campuses or online education, and you'll hear that such steps are too expensive. Ask about covering students' tuition, and you'll learn that paying for your schooling is a virtue. (''There's something good about hunger,'' one dean says. ''It is important for our students to be co-investors in their own education.'') Ask whether the recent $120 million operating surplus is a sign that Harvard could think of some new ways to spend its money, and you'll be told that that amount, left over after subtracting operating expenses from the sum total of endowment payouts, tuition, research grants and other income, is not all that significant. (''It's in the noise,'' Rudenstine says.) Rudenstine dismisses calls for a change in Harvard's spending strategies as the usual campus grumbling or the agitation of uninformed outsiders.



It is true that the situation looks more complicated from the inside. Perhaps because its purpose is to preserve generational equity in perpetuity, the Harvard endowment is often talked about as if it were a single, monolithic entity. In fact, it comprises 9,600 funds donated over the last three centuries. (Harvard's buildings, which the university carries at a depreciated value of $1.7 billion on its balance sheet, as well as its vast art collections and landholdings, are not included.) At most universities, the president controls the endowment. At Harvard, the endowment funds belong to whichever of the 10 schools they were donated. The result, a system known internally as ''Every tub on its own bottom,'' has produced wide disparities in wealth. The richest by far is the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university's undergraduate and graduate core; its endowment is $8 billion, greater than that of every other university but Yale, Texas, Stanford and Princeton. Next in size are Harvard's medical ($2.1 billion) and business ($1.3 billion) schools. Two of the poorest are education ($290 million) and design ($250 million).

Despite its decentralized budget pool, Harvard is an incredible fund-raising machine. When the university's governing body, the Harvard Corporation, hired Rudenstine in 1991, it wanted a conciliator who could bring together the independent deans to collaborate on the first university-wide campaign since the 1940's. An unexpected bonus, says Ronald Daniel, Harvard's treasurer, was that the quiet, self-effacing former Princeton provost became a magnet for big donors. Under Rudenstine's watch, Harvard conducted a six-year, $2.1 billion fund-raising campaign -- and exceeded its goal by $500 million. More than 68 percent of this $2.6 billion came from gifts of $1 million or more; there were 498 of these. And while only two gifts were $50 million or more, 90 donors gave gifts of $5 million or more. That Harvard is already so rich, and so much richer than every other school, seems only to enhance rather than to hinder its ability to attract large gifts. ''I like to back a good organization,'' says Thomas H. Lee, the centimillionaire leveraged-buyout fund manager, explaining why he gave such a wealthy school $22 million. ''Excellence is expensive.''

Harvard cultivates this crowd through an invitation-only organization called the Committee on University Resources, which was founded at the end of the 1960's to encourage those who have been generous to Harvard to give even more. A few years ago, for example, a university official told a COUR member, Albert J. Weatherhead 3rd, the owner of Weatherhead Industries in Cleveland, ''You're Harvard's third largest living donor, and you won't rest until you are No. 1.'' Weatherhead, who has given a total of nearly $50 million to the school, says, ''I just love that quote.'' When Rudenstine took office, there were 200 COUR members; today there are 400.

Typically, COUR's annual spring gathering, which takes place over two days in Cambridge, has a theme. During the last campaign, these included globalization and ethics. This year's event, however, was ''really unusual,'' says William Boardman, Harvard's associate vice president for capital giving. ''We didn't have a lot of fund-raising to talk about.'' Rather than something academic, he chose a theme more central to the lives of committee members, and perhaps the school as well: wealth management.



From his 16th-floor perch inside the Boston Federal Reserve office tower, Jack Meyer, Harvard Management Company's president and C.E.O., oversees a staff of 185 and the investment of the university's billions. Were it not for the sign on the door, you would have no idea that H.M.C. is a university-owned nonprofit rather than an independent, highly sophisticated money-management firm. There is the water view, the beautiful wood paneling and the very for-profit salaries. Last year, H.M.C.'s top five performing portfolio managers earned bonuses totaling more than $50 million. The single biggest payout went to the foreign-equity manager. He got $17 million, more than 48 times as much as Rudenstine's compensation of $352,650.

Once, these bonuses made Meyer, a friendly man who speaks with the fast clip common among those who wield power on Wall Street, a scourge in the Harvard community. ''In the early 90's, I received a lot of correspondence that was somewhat less than friendly,'' he says. Today, after the long bull market, even Jeremy Knowles, the arts and sciences dean, has made peace with Harvard's rewarding those who produce wealth much more generously than those who produce knowledge: ''I ask myself, How much would they have made at Goldman Sachs?'' (Knowles's salary, like that of every dean but that of the medical school, is less than $300,000. The average salary of a full professor at Harvard is $135,200.) [UD readers know that this era of good feelings did not last. These guys have all left because Harvard agreed to cut back on their salaries. Here's a typical letter from a Harvard person about the salaries.... In fact, there's an elegiac feel to this whole article -- everybody's gone -- Summers, Rudenstine, the fund managers... Everyone's gone. The only thing that's stayed in place is the hemorrhoidal hoard.]



Harvard began its metamorphosis into a hedge fund in the mid-70's, when, after a pair of Ford Foundation monographs encouraged universities to invest more aggressively, it set up its own shop. Since Meyer took over in 1990, H.M.C. has employed an aggressive but diversified arbitrage strategy to make a fortune for the university's endowment -- $4.3 billion last year alone, a sum roughly equal to Columbia University's entire endowment. H.M.C. has also spread its investment tentacles into 68 private equity and venture-capital firms and seeds new investment funds too. The first -- there are now four, all run by former employees -- was seeded in 1998, when H.M.C.'s top-performing hedge-fund manager, Jonathon Jacobson, quit to start his own firm shortly after receiving a $10 million bonus. The deal: Meyer gave Jacobson $500 million to manage in exchange for reduced fees. Another dividend: as a free agent at Highfields Capital Management, Jacobson can invest Harvard's money in controversial holdings -- he has invested in casino stocks, for example -- while reducing the risk of a major P.R. blow-up. (H.M.C.'s only in-house prohibition is tobacco investments.) Last year, according to the university's tax returns, H.M.C. paid Highfields $29 million for investment-management services.

Another factor helping the growth of the endowment has been Harvard's conservative payout policy. While the endowment's returns have surpassed the internal target of 6 to 6.5 percent above inflation for the last nine years, the corporation has paid out only 4.2 percent of its endowment on average to the deans for spending, less than the typical university target of 4.5 to 5 percent. The strategy has netted the university additional billions.

'Harvard's money became a puzzle to me,'' says the psychologist Carol Gilligan, who will resign from her post as a professor at the School of Education next spring and teach full time at New York University. ''Where are the resources of the university going?'' she asks. Over at the far wealthier law school (endowment: $930 million), Prof. Alan Dershowitz expresses a similar befuddlement over why he has had such a difficult time getting funds for the public-interest-law program. ''Harvard's goal is to die with the most amount of money,'' he says. ''It should not be the goal.''

Rudenstine counters with a lament: ''Everyone thinks of the $19.1 billion as one pot of money. It's thousands of pots of money that are restricted accounts.''

[Okay, time to get clear on the issue of restricted funds. Read on.]


In fact, 87 percent of the Harvard endowment is ''restricted'' to either a particular school or specific purposes at that school. Still, Harvard's claim that its hands are tied when it comes to spending remains open to question. First, Harvard, rather than wealthy donors, at times creates those restrictions. Take the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs. The Weatherheads had already given Harvard four professorships and wanted to have a global impact; they would have considered an unrestricted gift (so long as it was ''mind engaging''). Second, there has been as much as $920 million sitting unrestricted in the university's $3 billion general operating account. Much of that sum was generated in an unusual fashion -- by taking funds the deans set aside for near-term use, investing that money into the endowment and paying the deans a money-market rate of return while keeping the difference for the central administration. ''If you want to say it was risky, I can certainly agree with you,'' Rudenstine says, but ''in the end, proof happens in the pudding.''

But what is the point? Why run the machinery this way? Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law, thinks she understands Harvard's values. ''Money has become the exclusive denominator,'' she says. ''It defines everything: prestige, excellence, competence, commitment to the public good.'' Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, sets Harvard in a broader social context. ''We've reduced our definition of worth into fame and wealth, and it carries over into the way institutions think about themselves,'' he says. ''An overwhelmingly huge part of what Harvard is about is managing its money. The absurd theory is, Harvard is safe if there's an atomic bomb that destroys all of America -- Harvard will continue. Learning and studying are very simple things, and the values they require are the love of learning and intellectual curiosity. Are they fostered by wealth? I don't think so. Smugness is fostered by wealth.''



Even those from institutions that have profited in the same ways Harvard has, if less spectacularly, question Harvard's choices. James Freedman, the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, tells me that as a former president of Dartmouth College (endowment: $2.5 billion), he ''can't throw stones at others.'' But within a matter of minutes, he is arguing for a radical revision of Harvard's endowment policies: ''You really wonder why Harvard, out of its $19 billion, couldn't take $1 billion and say, 'This is the capital that will fund our scholarships.''' John Hennessey, the president of Stanford University (endowment: $8.7 billion), which recently received the largest gift ever made to higher education -- a $400 million matching grant from the Hewlett Foundation -- says it's time for Harvard to re-examine its financial priorities. The issue of whether the endowment is big enough or if its size warrants fundamental changes to the school's mission is one that the next president of Harvard ''will have to face,'' he says. [Apparently not.]

When I relay some of these comments and suggestions to Rudenstine, he characterizes his first three years at Harvard as a ''nightmare'' because of the early-90's recession and deficits at the school. ''So my first question when anybody says something about what any university should be doing is, Tell me how much you know about running a university.'' When I reply that some of these critics do (or have) run colleges and universities, he asks: ''But do they know anything about Harvard? Harvard is different.'' [Harvard can't spend its endowment until it's a hundred billion.]

Harvard is indeed different. as Howard Gardner, a professor at the Graduate School of Education, notes: ''Harvard is older than the United States, and I think there's a reason for that. It's been very well managed.'' That management denies Harvard's president the authority to spend the university's money as he sees fit. But Summers will have power all the same. There is, for starters, the unrestricted money in the general operating account; that $920 million alone is more than the entire endowment of Boston University ($913 million) or Georgetown ($745 million). As the fund-raiser in chief, too, Harvard's president can steer donors toward particular projects.

While there's no indication that Summers plans to shift Harvard's strategy, there are those who believe he has precisely the kind of credentials to effect change if he wants to. In terms of brilliance and force of personality, Summers -- who at 28 was the youngest professor to receive tenure at Harvard in its modern history -- is as well equipped as anyone. And it stands to reason that the Harvard officials who chose him had more in mind than hiring a financial campaign guru. ''If you were focused on money and fund-raising, that was probably not where Larry's competitive advantage lay,'' says his mentor and predecessor at Treasury, Robert Rubin. ''He's much more caught up in the question of Harvard's mission.'' [This all sounds pretty amusing in retrospect.]

Not that it would be easy. Should Summers seek to generate greater societal and intellectual returns on his school's money, he would need to persuade the corporation, which sets the endowment payouts, to be more generous. He would probably run into resistance. A remark from Harvard's treasurer, Ronald Daniel, suggests why: ''Harvard is still a long way from having 'more than what it needs,''' he says. [Okay. Make it two hundred billion.] Even where there is no doubt about the school's financial security, ingrained caution toward spending is a brake. (Harvard was, of course, founded by Puritans.) When faculty members think about the endowment, they tend to share Harvard's conservative spending values. ''What the $19 billion ought to allow us to do is be very thoughtful about how we go about making decisions,'' Gardner says. But mostly it is not a concern. As Henry Louis Gates Jr., who runs Harvard's Afro-American studies department, describes the endowment: ''It's like the air we breathe. We take it for granted. It's around you all the time, so you don't think about it.'' [All I need is the air that I breathe and four hundred billion... All I need is the air that I breathe...]

And were Summers to act, he would first have to contend with the great intramural disparities. The deans of the rich schools are likely to favor the capitalist status quo -- Every tub on its own bottom does make a larger number of people both responsible and accountable,'' says Knowles, the arts and sciences dean -- while it's hard to imagine the poorer deans entirely ignoring the untapped coffers around them. At the School of Public Health, which lacks a core of wealthy alumni supporters, Barry Bloom, its dean, describes his tub's financial set-up as ''a pretty hazardous situation,'' because 59 percent of his professors' salaries are paid for with grant-sponsored funds. He says it ''would be reasonable'' if Harvard paid at least half.



Many are skeptical that the money race is over. As Harvey Cox, a Harvard Divinity School professor who has been teaching there since 1965, says: ''The idea that the big capital fund-raising drive came to an end when Neil Rudenstine announced whatever colossal amount of money it was, is simply not true. The next day, we were, of course, raising money again.'' Sachs, the economics professor, acknowledges feeling like a "relentless fund-raising machine," but he expects change soon: "Harvard now has the happy circumstance of being able to move in a new direction." [Any minute now, Sachs... Sachs? Oh. He left.] Arthur Levine, the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, likens Summers to Charles Eliot, Harvard's president from 1869 to 1909, who transformed the school into a modern national institution: "The task before him is to take a Harvard that has been the leader in industrial America and make it into the foremost university in an information age, and he has the resources to do it."

So far, this generation's Eliot has spent much of his time on airplanes, traveling around to meet Harvard's biggest donors, which is, depending on how you look at it, either an inauspicious harbinger for his presidency or simply a matter of Realpolitik. Or maybe nobody's business but the school's and that of its citizens and donors. When we spoke this spring, Summers said it was "very premature to be making vision statements." Fair enough. Still, it's hard to lie low when you have $19 billion [Turns out to be even harder when it's $30 billion.], especially when it derives in part from favorable tax policies. For now, at least, he describes fund-raising as just a means to an intellectual end. "If the time were ever to come when we were consuming large amounts of resources and not making a commensurate contribution to teaching and knowledge," he says, "that would be a very serious problem, indeed."

'The current leader? Illinois, based solely on two Illini players who ran a burglary ring in Champaign until they were caught just after the conclusion of the regular season. They got hit with a sledgehammer, points-wise: 24 total for all the charges, a nigh-insurmountable lead. ... [The Florida Gators have] exceeded our lowest expectations, sadly [the Fulmer's creator is a Gator fan], with Ronnie Wilson's discharging an AK-47 in downtown Gainesville being the nadir of the current season's swing through the Cup.... [My personal favorite Fulmer guy is] Ben Siegert, defensive tackle for the Oregon State Beavers, [who] got drunk, stole a sheep being used in a study on homosexual behavior in animals, and was caught driving around Corvallis with it by police. He blew a .14, claimed it was part of a prank, and said 'I'm from the city, I don't know anything about sheep.' ... The record for a single score is San Jose State's Ellis T. Jones, who earned 34 points single-handedly by placing ads for bargain goods on Craigslist, lying in wait for his victims at an apartment complex, and then Tasering them before taking their money and, in one case, stuffing the victim into a trunk. A special award was created for just this instance, the "Ellis T. Jones" award, given to the single biggest malefactor of the season. ...'

'...Legislators setting policy with regard to higher education should realize that colleges and universities are our nation’s richest — and possibly most miserly — “nonprofits.”

Colleges and universities are sitting on a fortune in tax-free funds, and sharing almost none of it. Higher education endowment assets alone total over $340 billion. Sixty-two institutions boast endowments over $1 billion. Harvard and Yale top the list with endowments so massive, $28 billion and $18 billion respectively, that they exceed the general operating funds for the states in which they reside. It’s not just elite private institutions that do this; four public universities have endowments that rank among the nation’s top 10. The University of Texas’ $13 billion endowment is the fourth largest nationwide, vastly overshadowing most of the Ivy League.

These endowments tower over their peers throughout the nonprofit world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is America’s wealthiest museum. But the Met’s $2 billion endowment is bested by no less than 26 academic institutions, including the University of Minnesota, Washington University in St. Louis, and Emory. Indeed, the total worth of the top 25 college and university endowments is $11 billion greater than the combined assets of their equivalently ranked private foundations — including Gates, Ford and Rockefeller.

Higher education endowments also are growing much faster than private foundations. The value of college and university endowments skyrocketed 17.7 percent last year, while private foundation assets increased 7.8 percent. Just 3.3 percent of the increase in academic endowments is attributable to new gifts. Most of the gain is a result of stingy, outdated endowment payout policies that retain and perpetually re-invest massive sums. This widespread practice results in a hoarding of tax-free funds.

A recent survey of 765 colleges and universities found they are spending 4.2 percent of their endowments’ value each year. Meanwhile, private foundations — which are legally required to spend at least 5 percent of their value annually — average 7 percent spending.

Higher education endowments differ from private foundations in one particularly important respect. Private foundations exist to give their money to others, while college and university endowments support just one charity — their school. But isn’t being your own sole beneficiary reason to spend more, not less? Particularly when a substantial area of spending — financial aid grants to current students — targets precisely the people you expect will be your future donors?



Paradoxically, it is precisely the meager financial aid outlays of endowment-rich colleges and universities that make the true miserliness of low payout practices most apparent. Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

The University of Texas’ nine campuses enroll 147,576 undergraduates who each pay on average $5,903 in tuition. All of U.T.’s undergraduates could attend school tuition-free if the system spent half the amount the university’s endowment grew just last year.

Of course just because a college can afford to offer education tuition-free doesn’t mean it should. Giving a free ride to students who can afford to pay obviously would cut into the bottom line in other ways. Also, education is a real service for which people should pay. And a higher quality education should command a steeper price.

But college and university endowment spending practices should reflect the public responsibility that adjoins tax-free status. When people donate to a school they get a tax break because their donation is supposed to serve the public. When those untaxed funds sit unused, piling up for decades, taxpayers are making a sacrifice and getting nothing in return.



College and university endowments currently are exempt from the 5 percent annual payout requirement. Institutions of higher education aren’t even required to publicly report endowment payout rates or the purposes for which funds are spent. And the only organization that collects that information, the National Association of College and University Business Officers, does not make it public, except on an aggregate basis. Congress should require payout rates and specific expenditures for individual institutions to be made public each year. And if this “sunshine” fails to drive up endowment spending, a minimum payout requirement should be established.

And 5 percent should be considered just a starting point. College and university endowments exist to support current operations. But if that only requires a mere 4 percent draw, clearly there is ample room to use additional endowment funds for purposes that serve the public directly. For example, why not take some of the burden off students, families and taxpayers by providing more financial aid to needy students? After all, why should taxpayers be subsidizing an ever-burgeoning number of student loans while schools can afford to provide more scholarships?



For too long the government response to skyrocketing tuition has been to increase the size and number of student loans. Now the plan is to make loan repayment easier and increase grant aid again. But making it possible for students and parents to go more deeply into debt only encourages endowment hoarding and runaway tuition. It is time for legislators to come up with a smarter strategy for addressing college affordability — one that will pressure colleges and universities to better serve students, families, and taxpayers. And getting schools to stop hoarding billions in tax-free funds would be a good first step.

The high cost of education has consequences. When asked to name an expense that is beyond their reach, people cite “paying for college” more than buying a home, retirement, or anything else. The intimidating effect of high tuition is the largest “access” problem in American higher education. If colleges and universities truly want to open their doors to all, they will begin by sharing their riches.'

'She had a tongue-in-cheek attitude about her success in securing grants. [One colleague] recalls how she often wore buttons on her clothes - such as one that read, "Girls just like to have funds."

Denton's ability to decouple from her career won her the admiration of her friends.

"She would travel a lot and go to meetings, and then she'd call me and tell me that she was calling from a beach or a hot tub. When she was here, she would always be the first one to round up people to go to the Terrace on Friday and just hang out. She didn't always have an agenda," says [a second colleague].

Ultimately, Denton's colleagues agree that her favorite song best captured her intense integrity and drive to champion people who needed support.

"In the CD player in her car, she always played this country western music," laughs [a friend]. "Her favorite song, the one she played at her tenure party was [Garth Brooks'] 'I Got Friends in Low Places.'"

"It was her theme song [...] She wasn't too proud for anybody."'

Balinesia

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Boise State joined the college football big time in 1996, hoisting itself up to what was, in simpler times, called Division I-A from what was then Division I-AA.

On Jan. 1, 2007, the Broncos upset Oklahoma 43-42 in a Fiesta Bowl game that ranks among the most thrilling in the history of the sport.

That established Boise as the fruition of smaller schools' wildest dreams about upward mobility in college football. The colder and more common reality can be found at the bottom of our rankings of 119 Division I-A teams over the past 10 years.



The basement is where we find most of Boise's peers from the 1990s land rush from I-AA to I-A: dead last at No. 119 we have Buffalo (moved up in 1999); at No. 113 is Louisiana-Monroe (moved up in '94); at No. 107 is Arkansas State (moved up in '92); and at No. 106 is Idaho (moved up in '97).

And don't forget the most recent additions, No. 117 Florida International (started football in 2002 and currently owns the worst winning percentage of them all) and No. 105 Florida Atlantic (started football in 2000).

Look at the have-nots and you can see that Boise is the ultimate exception to a hard-and-fast football rule: Upgrading is an incredibly painful, slow and humbling process. Ambition comes with a heavy price tag.



Nouveau riche strivers tend to get their brains beaten in by the old-money bullies. [Very nice sentence.] They lose games and lose money, oftentimes stretching former I-AA budgets to the breaking point in the upgrade effort. Stadiums must be expanded to meet I-A specs, and other facilities must be built or refurbished to recruit against the established powers.

When the red ink flows, they take on "guarantee" games against power programs, accepting six-figure checks in exchange for fearful whippings on the road. ["fearful whippings on the road" -- again, very nice. Kinky.] That's the college football version of the poverty cycle, making the road from I-AA to BCS glory and riches a boulevard of broken dreams. [Sure, cliches. But you don't mind, right? Because there's a richness here, a sensibility.]

Yet more and more schools want a piece of it, with I-A membership growing from 111 a decade ago to 119 today, and 120 tomorrow. Western Kentucky will be the newest member, giving up habitual I-AA success to join the downtrodden Sun Belt Conference in football.

But the bottom of the barrel is not strictly lined with newbies whose reach has exceeded their grasp. There are a few other categories of schools represented.



Although faced with similar challenges as Air Force and Navy, which have found success at this level, winning records and bowl trips have eluded Army.

There are square pegs in a round-hole sport, such as Army (111), Baylor (101) and Duke (115). Baylor and Duke are academically oriented private schools in meat-grinder conferences full of enormous state universities. Army is a completely different animal -- although, for some reason, fellow military schools Air Force and Navy have had some immense success the past decade.

There are schools languishing because of apathy and/or bad management, like UNLV (104) and Temple (118). Neither has a particularly good excuse for habitual lousiness, beyond a general lack of urgency from the fan base to do a whole lot better. (Duke could fit into this category as well, because basketball completely dwarfs football.) [Throughout this paragraph, there are words that should have been dropped to make things move more briskly: particularly, general, completely...]

There are the chronic poor, schools that have been around awhile with precious little to show for it. Most of them toil in the shadow of larger programs and continually dwell in the bottom half of their conferences. Some of them have been conference gypsies, migrating from one non-power league to another in search of a home. The roll call: Eastern Michigan (116), Ball State (108) and Kent State (109) from the Mid-American Conference; San Jose State (102), New Mexico State (110) and Utah State (114) from the WAC; and Louisiana-Lafayette (112) from the Sun Belt.

And then there is the rogue element: SMU (103), still crawling out of the smoking crater left by the NCAA's first (and undoubtedly last) football death penalty. Twenty years later, the Mustangs remain a shadow of their shadowy former selves. [See, this is nice. I like that volcano thing, and the shadow of the shadowy...]

All told, they make up a bottom 20 teams that almost never play on television and almost never shock the world. Fans give away their tickets to friends and co-workers when these teams come to town -- except when they're scheduled for homecoming. Recruits ignore their text messages. Reporters never call.

The strivers are all dreaming of becoming The Next Boise. But the strivers also know the reality of big-time football is a good deal less glorious.

Balinesia

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Balinesia

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'...[T]here is a special charisma attached to professors — to those who live in and tell us about the realm of spirit or mind — just as there was to representations of preachers in the 19th century. The stereotype, the haughty, bumbling, or lecherous professor, doesn't dispel the fascination with the life of the mind. A professor represents, as Stanley Aronowitz once said, "the last good job in America," where one has relative autonomy in doing one's work. People might begrudge that freedom, but they also might envy it.'

'The college professor category scored particularly well in stress level, flexibility and creativity. In addition, college professors reported the lowest average number of working hours per week (30) and the highest average number of vacation days (31). Dentists reported the shortest average vacation allowance (14 days).

"While salary is one of the most important factors in determining the worth of a job, workers today are far more selective in their career choice based on the job's growth potential, advancement, stress, and flexibility than in years past," said Meredith Hanrahan, senior vice president of marketing at Salary.com.'

'Christy Porucznik, an assistant professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah, wants mothers to be unafraid to breastfeed their babies.

In the middle of the television aisle at Costco. On a plane. Standing in front of a crowd during a work presentation. Christy Porucznik has breastfed her daughter in many public places.

She's not afraid to raise some eyebrows. And Porucznik, an assistant professor of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of Utah, wants other mothers to do the same.

She and other members of the Utah Breastfeeding Coalition are opening the 2nd Annual Breastfeeding Cafe inside Salt Lake City's Main Library in an effort to help society see breastfeeding as normal rather than taboo.

For the entire month of August, one of the shops on the main floor will become an information center where mothers, fathers and families can learn about the benefits of breastfeeding. The cafe also will be a place where new mothers can relax, breastfeed their infants and talk to other moms amid decorated tables.

"Our goal is to demonstrate that breastfeeding is normal," Porucznik said. "We need to start conversations about it, and not just between moms who are breastfeeding, but between all moms, kids and dads."

The cafe coincides with World Breastfeeding Week, which runs Aug. 1 through Aug. 7 and is celebrated in more than 120 countries, according to its sponsor, the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action.

The cafe name was inspired by the book of the same name, The Breastfeeding Café, a collection of nursing stories submitted by women and compiled by Barbara Behrmann.

The cafe will feature free classes where parents can learn infant CPR, the basics of prenatal, labor and postnatal massage, and ways to teach babies how to sign. Guests also can learn about infant massage, make their own baby slings and hear about hypnobirthing, which helps women give birth without using drugs, Porucznik said.

Mothers can add entries to a list of unusual places where they have breastfed their child, which Porucznik hopes will become a highlight. [That's easy. I breastfed in front of the room during the final exam of my Modern American Poetry course... Grades were really skewed that semester, I remember... women did strikingly better on the test than men... ]

"We want people to know that breastfeeding is everywhere," Porucznik said. "You might be sitting on a TRAX train and think the woman next to you is just cuddling their child, but it's happening all around you."

The cafe will help the public understand that breastfeeding is the "normal, natural thing to do," said Kathy Pope, coalition spokeswoman.

"We're all affected by breastfeeding," Pope said. "It shouldn't be embarrassing or uncomfortable, because you're not violating any indecency laws. Everyone has a right to eat in public - including a baby."'

'For the past two decades, Robert Sabes owned Schieks Palace Royale, one of the premier strip clubs in downtown Minneapolis and one of a string of business interests that have made Sabes an intriguing figure.

And for more than a year, the University of Minnesota has been chasing the colorful but reclusive Sabes [tough combination, colorful and reclusive], hoping his family would contribute financially to the school's new football stadium.

As recently as a week ago, the university listed the Sabes Family Foundation as verbally committing $1 million to the project -- making Sabes potentially one of the largest donors to the new 50,000-seat stadium.

"The university has had a number of discussions with the foundation about opportunities to support our mission, whether it is the stadium or in another way," said Dan Wolter, a university spokesman.

"We don't comment on discussions with donors and potential donors."

University officials involved in the drive to raise $86 million in private money for the $288.5 million stadium, including Joel Maturi, the school's athletic director, declined to comment on the potential gift or Sabes' background with Schieks.

But a university adjunct professor, who said he had approached Sabes' foundation on behalf of the stadium fundraising drive, said the contribution had grown more uncertain even as school officials count it toward the $60 million already raised privately for the stadium. Andy Andrews, an adjunct professor with the Carlson School of Management, said that the foundation had in effect withdrawn its commitment, and that university officials are now scrambling to get the family to reconsider.

"He's a very generous guy," said Andrews, who said he first approached the foundation at least two years ago and said he was asked recently by stadium fundraising officials to lobby it again. [So a professor at Minnesota has the task of shaking money out of people for the stadium. Is that part of his Annual Review?] Andrews said Sabes' business interests were not part of the university's fundraising discussions, and added that "I don't suppose I gave it much thought. I'm just trying to raise money for the stadium."

Steve Sabes, the family foundation's trustee, said neither the foundation nor Robert Sabes would comment on their discussions with the university. "He's a private person. He just doesn't want to get involved," said Stevn Sabes. Robert Sabes is listed as a foundation manager in 2005, the most recent year for which state records are available. The foundation reported $43 million in assets that year.

A 'minor investment'

Though friends and business associates describe Sabes, 67, as having a long history of philanthropic activity in Minnesota, particularly with Jewish causes, his ownership of Schieks -- and his history of casino and other interests -- has stood in vivid contrast to his charitable work. City records in fact show that Sabes sold Schieks, located in a distinctive bank building on S. 4th Street across from the former federal courthouse, earlier this year for $10 million.

"He doesn't have a bad bone in his whole body," said Jimmy Pesis, a former Minneapolis bar owner and acquaintance of Sabes, who last year was listed in city records as living in Las Vegas. "That bar that you talked about [Schieks] is just some little, minor investment."

Sabes has indeed always been about more than Schieks.

Others who know Sabes describe a wide array of business ventures including, according to state records, companies that owned a variety of local restaurants, among them the Freight House in Stillwater. In the early 1990s, a Sabes-owned restaurant in Minneapolis -- Jersey's Sports Bar -- was listed as having the most police calls in the city. Sabes also made headlines in the mid-1990s when it was disclosed he guaranteed a $40,000 loan to then-Hennepin County Commissioner Sandra Hilary, who sought Sabes' help to battle a gambling addiction.

Sabes, however, has been involved with gambling interests on a larger stage and served, for a time, as chief executive officer for the Gaming Corporation of America, a company that sought casino management contracts with Indian tribes across the country. Sabes complained that federal and state regulators had unfairly cast him, and even his father, Moe, a founder of the American Fruit & Produce Co., as having links to organized crime figures.

"This all seems surreal," Sabes told Corporate Report of Minnesota, a business trade journal, in 1993.

'Giving back is critical'

Robert Kramarczuk, a professor at Hamline University and a friend of Sabes for 40 years, said he and Sabes worked with political leaders in Ukraine in the early 1990s to help bring modern farming methods to the country. "We were a little bit ahead of our time," said Kramarczuk, who said Sabes provided "expertise and money" for the project.

"To him, giving back is critical," said Kramarczuk. "He's probably one of the most generous, forgiving people that I know."

Though many of Sabes' friends downplayed his role with Schieks -- and contend he long wanted to sell it -- a city licensing official said Sabes clearly appeared to be in charge of the strip club during his ownership. Grant Wilson, the city's business license manager, said he and Sabes sparred over littering issues when Schieks employees, mostly young women, handed out promotional cards outside the Metrodome on game days. [No doubt he's planning the same sort of promotional thing for the outside of the university's stadium... And since he's one of its major donors, who's to stop him?] "He fought us every inch of the way," he said.'

Balinesia

On the way back from snorkeling yesterday, driving the twisting, rutted, up and down, insanely overused mountain roads, it became clear that many Balinese were hurrying, on their thin, cheap-gas-puffing motorcycles, to a village ceremony.

The strange flying circus they made kept passing us in the opposite direction on the road: elaborately costumed men and women -- the men in brilliantly laundered white shirts and hats, the women in lacy orange blouses and long yellow skirts, the women's hair a carefully upswept bun with a pink flower set at its knot, their lips pinky red with lipstick and their cheeks sepia with makeup and their eyes a sexual black with mascara -- balanced with ease and agility on the narrow seat of the scooter.

In front, each man steered each tiny steed, threading it among foul lumbering trucks, sleeping dogs, wandering children, sudden herds of other scooters all going twice the man's speed, groups of crossing pedestrians, random piles of wood and construction equipment... In the back, the woman sat a loose, precarious sidesaddle because of her tight skirt, and she balanced on her head a tall fruit sculpture, and held in her lap a bamboo basket bulging with banners and streamers.

Or perhaps in her lap, or between the man's legs, sat a small child, happy and excited to be sitting up on the scooter with his parents as they just grazed a laundry truck bombing by them downhill at forty miles an hour...

This scene, which continued for ten riveting minutes, comes to me now as... as what? Why so compelling?

An eerie balletic defiance, let's say, in which the Balinese acknowledge modernity by placing their equilibrious asses upon our ugly engines and making them magical broomsticks. All my fear of the machine and my fear of mishap attended my observation of these preternaturally composed spirits, indifferent to choking fumes and speed and bumps, intent on the anticipated ceremony.

As I watched them, I had the following thought: They will fly through my dreams for the rest of my life.

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'Abraham Lincoln is credited with this observation: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time." [We're starting in a galaxy far away from our subject... But it might work...]

Honest Abe [SOS is getting nervous. Honest Abe... ] succumbed to an assassin's bullet in 1865. The University of Minnesota would have its first graduating class in 1873.

There were two graduates, or roughly the number of scholarship basketball players that wore the cloak and gown during the Dan Monson era.

The above timeline makes it obvious that President Lincoln never met a loyal follower of the Golden Gophers, or to maintain honesty he would have amended the quote to say:

"... You cannot fool all of the people all of the time, unless you're talking about Gophers fans." [Whew. What an exhausting way of getting to a very very simple point.]

Lou Holtz proved without question what saps we can be when his relentless bull-slinging instantly filled the Metrodome. To his credit, Holtz brought with him a strong résumé as a head coach. When the rhetoric stopped for three hours on a Saturday, he was a tremendous offensive coach.

Two decades later, we are being swept off our feet by another slinger in Tim Brewster. What this says is our sap ratio actually has increased in the past two decades, since Brewster brings with him only the verbosity and no track record.

The guy coached for 18 years in Division I-A or the NFL and his bosses resisted the urge to make him a coordinator.

The Gophers fired Glen Mason after the bowl choke against Texas Tech, and Joel Maturi started his search. Once Brewster got the athletic director in a room and started excitedly spewing clichés, our poor bumpkin from the Iron Range didn't have a chance. [This gets better as it goes along, but the writer needs to drop some excess weight: excitedly, poor.]

The spewing hasn't stopped since Brewster was hired in mid-January. He has gone running to every group that will have him, flapping his arms like San Diego's Famous Chicken and screeching, "Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl."

He's also the runaway pitchman in recruiting, where his enthusiasm seems to be convincing all of the prospects some of the time.

Brewster reached a new level in his self-promotion last week when he used a sexual assault investigation to tell us how lucky we should feel to have him.

On Monday, Dominic Jones was charged, and it came with the allegation that his actions were videotaped on Alex Daniels' cell phone. Once Mike Freeman, the Hennepin County attorney, told the tale, it was certain that the university hierarchy was not going to have Jones, Daniels, Keith Massey and E.J. Jones playing football for the Gophers.

The university allowed Brewster to offer the spin that he had reached independently the decision to dismiss the four players from the team.

A statement was released Wednesday in which Brewster said: "We spend a considerable amount of time addressing our players regarding their personal conduct. ... We are establishing a culture of integrity and we will demand that our players are held accountable for their actions."

Two questions:

• Brewster was on the job for three months when the alleged assault of the 18-year-old woman took place. So, why is the coach bragging about addressing his players on personal conduct, if some of them obviously didn't listen?

• If he's forced to establish a culture of integrity, it would seem that he's telling us it was missing when he took over for Mason. So, how was it that Mason dismissed several players for much less serious failings, without feeling the need to pay tribute to himself for doing so?

Yes, this was a high-profile situation that demanded a statement from the coach, but a simple declaration from Brewster that the action had been taken would have left no room for cynicism.

Throw in Maturi's comment -- "I am in full support of the decision of coach Brewster and I appreciate how he has handled this very difficult situation" -- and it all comes off as more of an ain't-Tim-great sales pitch than a sincere reaction to this embarrassment suffered in the athletic department.

You're being manipulated, folks, but as we've learned previously, a football coach with a talent for slinging can fool all of the Gophers fans all of the time.'

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Balinesia

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