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Saturday, March 24, 2007

As With Harvard...

...so with Stanford, alumni are beginning to realize that they must stop being enablers.

A recent Stanford graduate - a writer for the Los Angeles Times - explains:


'Stanford is always just asking for money — which I find odd, since I already paid them a lot. My latest letter says the school is trying to raise $4.3 billion by 2011 as part of the Stanford Challenge.

... For those of you who have never been to the 8,000-acre Stanford campus, it's very dissimilar to most places begging for charity. Darfur, for instance, doesn't have its own new rubgy stadium. AIDS hospitals rarely have as many tennis courts.

Stanford, which raised nearly $1 billion in donations just last year — a record for a university — has an endowment of more than $14 billion. That's more than the Gross Domestic Product of Belize or Sierra Leone — which has diamonds.

New buildings pop up at Stanford like weeds. Weeds with names like Packard and Gates. The just-renovated basketball arena has no advertising at all inside, because a rich guy found them aesthetically displeasing. So he simply bought them all.

Stanford could stop charging undergrads the $43,361 for tuition, room and board and call it an accounting error on its interest. It makes more sense for Rupert Murdoch to ask me for charity money. At least I still use his products.

I understand that rich people like to give money to organizations that make them look good. They want a powerful alma mater, a nice opera house, a buoyant Venice and a tidy stretch of road for Bette Midler to drive on. But they shouldn't be able to write these donations off as tax-deductible charities.

Time Inc. will match my donations to Stanford, but not to actual educational charities. That's despite the fact that only 3 percent of students at the top colleges come from families in the bottom economic quartile....'