Aggressive, acquisitive, not terribly moral, hyper-rich people will always want to be associated with universities, and will often pay immense sums for the association. Universities – meditative, morally serious, non-materialistic – stand for everything these people are not.
Some super-wealthy want a trusteeship for cover. For Bernard Madoff to sit on a Yeshiva University board – as he did – was obviously a great coup for him, a great whitewashing.
But most of the venture capitalists panting to be trustees have more complex motives. Certainly some see it as an opportunity to make yet more money by getting the university to invest in their companies. More broadly, some know that they’ll make a useful set of social and business connections in this way.
And of course it’s good for the ego. Being a university trustee has a high hoity-toity factor; it impresses people.
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The contemporary American university is well within its rights to trade on its symbolic capital in exchange for real capital. If Steven A. Cohen desperately wants, along with his eight billion dollars, to be a Brown University trustee, let him for God’s sake. Are you an idiot?
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And what are the deeper motives here? What precisely is that symbolic capital which can be worth so much in sheer dollars to the university?
A lot of people yearn to be perceived not merely as smart, but as cultured. The contemporary art market would collapse if it had to rely on people actually understanding and liking particular pieces or traditions of art.
Art and culture acquisitions are quick ways of making oneself aesthetically and intellectually superior, and this is important to many people, since it seems to be the case that the more material goods you acquire, the more anxious you become not to be perceived as motivated by material gain.
It’s an odd paradox – the more sixty million dollar yearly bonuses Lloyd Blankfein gets, the more antsy Lloyd Blankfein becomes not to be perceived as greedy.
Offsetting that remarkable level of personal greed is not easy, however, and something like a university trusteeship says two important things at once: I’m not spending all of my time as a vampire squid. And I have a soul; it’s not all about money for me.
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There are exceptions to this craving for university capital. Donald Trump is a true blue American vulgarian. But as a general rule, the finer the university, the higher the price it can place on its capacity to shed non-materialism upon the materialistic.
Hence the University of Chicago acted rationally when it made Rajat Gupta a trustee. I guess appointing Steve Stevanovich was also rational. But after awhile, as Yeshiva University learned, a critical mass problem may develop. After awhile, you take on one too many suspected insider traders or whatever, and your university’s reputation begins to suffer.
Your reputation is the source of your symbolic capital. Fuck it up, and Steve Cohen isn’t buying.
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In the case of the University of Virginia, the problem seems not so much lawsuits and questionable business practices as the decision to put trustees with no discernible sense of the nature of universities in positions of great power. Fiascos of the sort U Va is dealing with will eventually happen when you give your entire board of trustees over to the corporate world.
June 24th, 2012 at 11:06AM
Universities – meditative, morally serious, non-materialistic
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July 16th, 2013 at 7:53AM
[…] Steven Cohen, whose personal worth is between eight and ten billion dollars, sits on your board of trustees, you, as president of Brown University, are going to be challenged […]