A Harvard student argues that admissions based purely on the amount of money random parents give — and this sort of quid pro quo gift is typically, apparently, in the hundreds of millions — should be encouraged, and stuff like legacies and athletics not so much. Indeed, Harvard — laboring under a $53.2 billion endowment — would do well to increase the price of pure money admission, lest the school’s wealth drop by a perilous amount.

It’s an interesting model. There are currently 2,781 billionaires in the world, and let’s assume a healthy chunk of them (Musk has eight children and counting) want their kids to go to Harvard. Straightforwardly monetizing Harvard admissions – setting the price as clearly as countries offering citizenship, for instance, set prices – and taking a lot of billionaire kids every year, would top up that b$53.2 by a good amount.

Assuming Harvard’s goal is at least a one hundred billion dollar endowment (which I think most reasonable people would consider a pretty solid pile, plus a rainy day fund), and say they want to reach that goal in ten years (again, a reasonable aim) you could do the math with not much trouble and simply let billionaire applicants know what the winning number would be.

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OTOH –Mr UD proposes targeting much-childed billionaires… oh, okay, here’s a partial list —

• Frank VanderSloot: Has 14 children.
• Farris Wilks: Has 11 children.
• David Duffield: Has 10 children.
• Jerry Moyes: Has 10 children.
• Nelson Peltz: Has 10 children.
• Richard Schulze: Has 10 children.
• Fred Smith: Has 10 children.

— and communicating to them that there will be an auction. Brilliant.

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Update: Gevalt. My buddy Philip tells me the correct ‘number of Muskian progéniture’ is 13.

Update: 14.

Plenty of lefties find a $53.2 billion nonprofit intellectual community (Harvard) a little hard to grasp qua concept; read Robert Reich and many others. Indeed the graphic and grotesque injustice of superfatcat money-hoarder Harvard amid hundreds of struggling meritorious schools is a far leftier… visual... than right. The right is where no-ceiling-on-personal-and-institutional-wealth people like Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow hang out; it’s predominantly the left that cares about wealth inequality.

Gregory Conti acknowledges that “skepticism” (I’d call it revulsion) in regard to small singular institutions hoarding billions and billions of dollars is not “an intrinsically right-wing proposition.” Nor should it be. But he correctly notes that, in the last few years, most democratic politicians, to their shame, have left the Ivies alone to play with their money, and that it’s the right which has pushed for endowment taxes. Indeed there’s a weird inversion here – the lawmaker lefties who should militate against the degenerate and destructive greed of some of our universities don’t give a shit, while the lawmaker righties who have no problem with greed and don’t like taxes do give a shit. Hm.

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Conti will go on to argue that left-dominated elite universities have no one to blame but themselves for their impending tax doom; if they’d been high-quality, neutral seekers after wisdom rather than woke noisemakers they wouldn’t have raised the hackles of conservative, vindictive legislators.

 Go to any of, say, the 20 private colleges with the largest endowments and just look at the signage posted throughout campus for events, programs, services: You will find that at every one they convey a near-identical blend of culturally progressive presuppositions, identitarian appeals, and therapeutic argot.

Okay so I spent years teaching at GW (I know; not rich and elite enough; but hear me out) and years tromping around Harvard (father-in-law was a Harvard prof), and I’ve been visiting/writing about universities for decades. Here’s what you’re likeliest to see posted around most elite schools: Information about campus worship services. Dates/locations of standardized tests. Rentals near campus. Political signage from all sides – pro-Israel, anti-Israel, etc. Cultural event/lecture notices. Lowkey appeals to use campus health services if you are feeling down. Student suicide is a serious problem, and I’m not sure what “therapeutic argot” is bothering Conti, but the phrases I can recall are things like you’re not alone and talk to someone.

Nothing is more exactingly identitarian than fraternities and secret societies and houses, but these cliques are, by definition, not going to plaster statues of Elihu Yale with come-ons.

And as to the quality argument: Ivies have long handed down gentlemen’s C’s and welcomed Jared Kushners; they’re famous for it. Legacy admits are quite a thing, and they’ve watered down quality bigtime forever.

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No, for ol’ UD the only real argument in favor of taxing endowments in the many billions has nothing to do with right or left. It’s socially destructive for outrageous wealth to lie in the exclusive hands of small entities, personal or institutional. Are you okay with Elon Musk romping through the federal government, firing everyone and shutting everything down? Should have thought of that before you let him accumulate 420 billion dollars. Do you think it’s weird that one of Harvard’s recent presidents fucked its endowment to the tune of one billion dollars because no one was able to stop him from using it for high-risk credit default swaps? And that he freelanced for a hedge fund while president? Way woke, babe.

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UD thanks Rita for the link.

[Derek Bok] said the issue of tackling legacies had become more urgent than when he ran Harvard, because the competition for places had intensified and the evidence for reform had strengthened. He said he was unconvinced that abolition would weaken fundraising efforts, but in any case “there comes a moment when it becomes more important to do the right thing”.

And now that Harvard has a fifty billion dollar endowment, I think it’s time we dipped a toe in the water! Fuck it man! Let’s do the right thing!

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Update: You’ve got 50 bill and hoard it. This poor little widow had only one bill and she made medical school free in perpetuity for all students at Albert Einstein! You could easily do that for some of your schools, but you’re about rich, not poor, people.

Curiouser and curiouser. The title refers to a number of pro-Israel billionaires who recently sponsored a fund-raiser for the North Carolina Republican leading the federal harassment of Ivy League universities for their purported anti-semitism.

These same lads – shockingly – are going after the manifold tax breaks that make it possible for Harvard University both to be designated a non-profit organization AND be worth around eighty billion dollars … or something like that number… I mean, there’s the endowment, whose amount we know; but there’s also real estate, about which we don’t know — so this is UD‘s probably pretty lame estimate of Harvard’s pile of dough…

… What the fuck make it a hundred billion. There are other assets. Make it five hundred billion. Who the fuck knows.

Anyway, a lot of these pro-Israel billionaire guys are working against their own interests, cuz they’re the very moneybags who have over the years given SOOOO much of their loot to Ivies like Penn and Harvard that they’re practically running the places, but they couldn’t have given so much and gotten so powerful without the tax breaks against which they’re now militating! Ya falla?

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.

She has resigned.

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[T]he important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

So here’s UD‘s take on that one. Although it sounds unpleasantly snobby and snippy to say things like “has not written a single book,” it’s true that in many fields (not all), books are the currency, and UD too was surprised that one of the world’s preeminent universities chose as president someone with, yes, a “thin” scholarly record.

Yet if Gay hadn’t plagiarized throughout her career, UD would have let the thinness go, mainly because Gay seems to have moved from scholarship to administration pretty early, and if you’re a brilliant administrator (I have no idea whether she was), it’s arguable that you can be expected to ease up on your writing.

And listen — excellent essays can often have greater accessibility and impact than books. Think of ground-breaking essays by S. Huntington, J. Nash, R. Putnam… If one of Gay’s had been – not as staggering as those, but interestingly original, and seriously influential – UD also would have had no problem. A great essay, in any field, can sometimes demonstrate your scholarly quality better than a book. So for me the thinness is not about the lack of a book in particular; it’s about the lack of some form of impactful intellectual work.

I have heard from a source that is reliable but a step or two removed from the situation that the Harvard Corporation has asked President Gay to resign and she has refused. Gay has apparently said that if she is fired, she will sue. Gay has retained her own counsel. I can’t 100% confirm the above is true, but if it is, I am sure the Board is concerned about what may emerge in legal discovery in the event of litigation.

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Sounds plausible, I guess. In general folks are sniffing far too eagerly around the SOOOOper secret Harvard Corporation…. You remember Bagehot: “Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.” When people leave you alone every day to play to your heart’s content with fifty billion dollars, you’re unlikely to want that situation to get fucked up.

… because of that school’s perceived inadequate response to the Hamas atrocities, you know how this blog — which for years has condemned anyone giving anything to an institution currently hoarding close to fifty four billion dollars — feels. Same goes for other obscenely overendowed Ivies. If this event helps narcissistic hedgies discover legitimate uses for their charity, tant mieux.

A question we’ve asked for lo these many years on this blog.

… Charles William Eliot, who was president of Harvard from … 1869 to 1909? Forty years???

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In a 1904 letter to a friend, Eliot wrote:

I am inclined to think that you would be more tolerant than I of the presence of stupid sons of the rich...

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Not a peep all this time from the far more tolerant subsequent presidents…

70% of Harvard’s donor-related and legacy applicants are white, and being a legacy student makes an applicant roughly six times more likely to be admitted.

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[E]lite places become these little islands where rich people pass down their advantages to their kids. They marry each other. They invest massively in their kids. Their kids then go to these exclusive schools. They move to the same few metro areas. And people who don’t grow up in these kinds of resource-rich families are really left behind. We’ve created a caste society based on who gets into what exclusive colleges.

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After the death of affirmative action as (per SCOTUS) unfair preference, the complex business of legacy admits seems also to be circling the drain.

The word “legacy” covers not merely people admitted to selective schools because close relatives attended; it also can involve super-rich people donating (or likely to donate) multiple millions to buy a seat at these schools for their children. And it can have to do with talented athletes (most of them from expensive private secondary schools) admitted for their athletic rather than academic skill. It usually exhibits a mix of some of these elements.

Let’s look at a notorious case that in fact contains every one of these elements.

George Huguely, currently rotting in jail for killing his ex-girlfriend, was a legacy admit to the University of Virginia. “George III, George V’s grandfather, went to Sidwell Friends and the University of Virginia.” A friend of Huguely’s at the expensive, prestigious prep school he attended comments: “He was not a great student, but he didn’t care.” He was a great lacrosse player.

A hopeless alcoholic from a young age (Huguely’s father showed him how), Huguely boasted several booze-related arrests, including a quite serious one in Lexington, Virginia while he was a UVa student:

Officer Rebecca Moss discovered Huguely wobbling drunk into traffic near a fraternity at Washington and Lee University. She told him to find a ride home or face arrest. He began screaming obscenities and making threats. [Apparently he said “I’ll kill all you bitches.“]

“Stop resisting,” Moss said. “You’re only making matters worse.”

Moss and another female officer tried to subdue Huguely. He became “combative,” the police chief reported. Moss stunned him with a Taser, put him in a squad car, and took him to the police station.

At his court hearing a month later, Huguely said he didn’t remember much about the night and apologized. He pleaded guilty to public swearing, intoxication, and resisting arrest. He was fined $100 and given a 60-day suspended sentence.

Huguely bragged about the incident to [UVa] friends…

Some of these friends were, like Huguely, part of a drunk, entitled, obnoxious sometimes to the point of violence, rich lacrosse player culture where you don’t rat out buddies even if you know they’re really really dangerous and out of control. One assumes most of these friends laughed drunkenly along with Huguely as he detailed the latest incident in which he got away with… not murder. Not yet. But things were escalating, and some of his friends certainly knew he was threatening his ex-girlfriend and assaulting people he thought she was dating and just being a really scary violent crazy piece of shit.

It’s certainly worth asking what sort of subculture sees all of this and does nothing. It’s certainly worth asking how a non-academic, violent, total alcoholic with a criminal record was rewarded with an extremely competitive seat at one of the nation’s greatest universities. What did his prep school teachers and coaches, many of whom must have known or guessed how incredibly dangerous he was, write in their letters of recommendation about him? (Think also about poor drunk well-connected short-lived Paul Murdaugh, still a student in good standing at the University of South Carolina despite having recently killed a young woman and injured others while drunkenly at the helm of a family boat. Like Huguely, he already had a bunch of booze-related run-ins with police.

Two months after he was sprung from jail, a judge removed the only condition of his release — allowing him to travel outside the 14th Judicial Circuit, according to the news outlet.

Although he faced BUI charges, the state did not restrict him from drinking alcohol or driving a boat, the report said.

Another entitled rich kid given one free pass after another until… Well, one can’t help feeling for Paul Murdaugh. His own father murdered him.)

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“I was drinking a lot all the time, all the way from my freshman year to my senior year,” Huguely said at his trial. “I was drinking all the time. It was out of control.”

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Look. My point isn’t that legacy admits are murderers and degenerates. Most of them are pleasant well-meaning non-Ivy League material. But there’s a really anti-social pathology underlying the culture of lifelong consequence-free unearned social rewards of which some (not all) legacy admits are Exhibit A. The Varsity Blues criminal syndicate, and whatever current bogus athletics conspiracy has replaced it, is merely the crude extension of the basic legacy M.O. The socially acceptable con game of legacy admits makes the world safe for the scandal of Varsity Blues.

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And can you think of anything more morally corrosive than knowing that your corrupt parents and a corrupt institution engineered your sorry ass into a seat at Harvard? Knowing that you’re little more than a cold hard cash epiphenomenon to the institution – does that bother you at all? Does it feel like a prefiguration of your entire entitled life? Here’s a bunch of nice people getting me into Harvard; here’s a bunch of nice people showing me how to evade taxes. And so it goes.

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The tragedy of wealth-based admissions is that wealthy students are taking up seats from the poor, unconnected students who need them most. This is not a victimless crime.

…  [C]ollege leaders … sell access while squatting on multibillion-dollar endowments and spending vast sums of money on palatial campus buildings, leadership compensation, and administrative bloat.

And you’re paying for it:

… If a donor earns seven figures a year and lives in California, taxpayers can wind up subsidizing more than 52 cents of every dollar used to buy his child’s way into college. Even in states with less exorbitant tax rates, taxpayers routinely pick up more than 40% of the tab. That’s because these kinds of donations are wholly tax deductible: As long as there’s no explicit quid pro quo agreement, the IRS allows parents to write off their influence-peddling donations in full.

… Offering a special admissions track to the wealthy on the taxpayer’s dime impedes equal opportunity, rewards influence peddling, and robs the public. It’s time for a change. Colleges and universities should be places of opportunity, not institutions where background or wealth determine success. Wealthy applicants should have to earn their place in a university by the same rules as everyone else.

… We should press college officials to mean what they say about opportunity and equity, and to spend less time strong-arming wealthy donors. But at a bare minimum, we should get taxpayers out of the business of subsidizing campus shakedown artists.

And when I say pathology: Harvard is currently squatting on 53 billion dollars. It has yet more from other sources. And because the government, risibly, continues to consider it a non-profit institution, it enjoys amazing tax breaks. What sort of fucked up institution is still trading its integrity for more money under these circumstances?

Let’s start with delight: One of UD‘s heroes, Steven Pinker, has started a defense of free speech group among faculty there. Everyone’s got an eye on Stanford and Oberlin and multiple other stagers of politically coercive campus melodrama, and all self-respecting centers of free inquiry need to take an explicit stand against these enemies of freedom. UD’s beloved University of Chicago is a pioneer here; Harvard and other schools follow UC in strong unmitigated statements, rules, and organizations deployed to resist right and left ideologues – some of whom, grotesquely, were hired by these same universities – who are always trying to shut/shout down free thought and free expression. Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom (which includes econ prof Jason Furman, whose Cambridge house UD knows well, because for years it was owned by her buddy Peter Galbraith) rightly anticipates, and readies itself to fight, mindless and destructive fanaticism.

On the disgust front, there’s yet another greedy egomaniac who can’t think of anything to do with three hundred million dollars other than give it to an institution worth significantly more than fifty billion dollars in order to get his name on a building and get some tax benefits. Vomit.

Not to mention.

Ah, but unlike those other institutions, Harvard struggles with a 54 billion dollar endowment, and cannot be expected to overcome the legal and sand blasting hurdles that other institutions have overcome.

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!

Pablo Eisenberg, a hero of this blog (UD has forever shrieked at super-icky moneybags who give their hundreds of millions to Harvard), has died.

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(By the way — Harvard’s current endowment woes – it has only just reached 53.2 billion dollars – have energized its alumni network to organize a massive, unprecedented, Save Our School campaign, with outreach via Go Fund Me pages in addition to traditional methods. “Our rainy day fund is down to 10.5 billion,” warns Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT grad who nonetheless accepted a position as head of Harvard fund-raising because “Harvard is the lifeblood of Cambridge; when it goes, the city itself is imperiled.”)

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And as to how to convince people who give their money to Ivy League schools, rather than to the sort of places Eisenberg lists in my headline, to redirect their money… Well, you need to understand the cohort you’re talking about, first of all.

Let’s consider, for example, billionaire investor Marc Wolpow, who gives money to fat cat Wharton. What do we know about Marc?

Here’s our most recent information.

The wealthy head of [a] multi-billion dollar private equity firm is under investigation by Nantucket Police and the state Environmental Police for purposefully untying a 32-foot boat from a slip at Old North Wharf, allowing it to drift out of the Easy Street Basin and into the ferry lane. 

The suspect is Marc Wolpow, the co-CEO and co-founder of the The Audax Group, who allegedly found an unknown boat in the slip he uses on Old North Wharf on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 16…

After Wolpow untied it, the boat drifted dangerously past Steamboat Wharf, got pushed northward in the wash of the car ferry the M/V Woods Hole, then collided with the $5 million, 70-foot Viking sportfishing boat “El Jefe” causing damage to that vessel. It eventually ran aground near 22 Easton Street. 

Reached by phone this week, Wolpow declined to comment. 

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Here’s what’s shocking about this story:

1 Just anyone reached Wolpow by phone.

2 Wolpow declined to comment.

Why allow just anyone to get past your protection squad and reach you by phone? That’s nuts.

Even more bizarre is Wolpow’s refusal to say the obvious about his behavior.

Heard of property rights, asshole? [“Asshole” here refers to the person who got through to Wolpow’s phone.] It’s my fucking slip, I own it, and I don’t have to look at some cheap shitty boat some person decided to put in it. Do you think I want Nantucket boat owners to think I have a cheap shitty boat? It’s my right to do whatever I like to cheap shitty boats and I think the fucker who put it in my slip will think twice before he does it again. Oh, and fuck you for calling me.

Getting a person of this sort (Marc Kasowitz, Howard Marks, Vinod Khosla, Noam Gottesman, the Heliport Guys, stop me when you’ve had enough) to give money to what he inevitably is going to consider cheap shitty recipients will be very difficult indeed.