… 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.

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!

She forgot to mention his steadfast defense of Andrei Shleifer, his taking over Harvard’s endowment and promptly losing $1.8 billion, his hedge-fund freelancing while president of Harvard, etc., etc. Summers is a-fucking-mazing.

So do me a favor and read this first. Everything Frank Rich says there about Ma Ingalls’ rancid hypocrisy in her NYT anti-materialism screed goes quadruple now that Harvard’s been exposed as Mr. Epstein’s main squeeze. Harvard has spent decades sucking up so much money – dirty and semi-dirty and semi-clean and clean – that its endowment alone is $40 billion (Harvard’s wealth goes significantly beyond its endowment, kiddies). It sucks it up and it doesn’t spit it out (see this notorious cartoon); it hoards it. One assumes the goal (why? why is this the goal?) is a $100 billion endowment. Harvard, everyone jokes, is a “hedge fund with a university attached to it”; this non-profit paid each of its fund managers $35 million dollars a year until a few people squawked and it ended up on the front page of the NYT...

Why should Harvard – the world’s most powerful reputation-launderer – give a penny of that shit back? Why should they do anything with what they’re sitting on, you son of a bitch? It’s their money and fuck you.

Let’s bring a cold sharp Chicago School of Economics eye to the big ol’ worldwide elite college admissions scandal.

Ladies and gentlemen: To my left, a large cohort of global superrich so irresistibly attracted to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and let’s say ten to fifteen other colleges, that they are willing to pay the schools – what? – up to ten million? – bidding starts at ten million? – to get their kids in.

To my right, elite American universities with unimaginably large endowments. As we speak, for instance, Harvard’s is close to forty billion.

Hundreds of billions of dollars that might go to actual need sit static in the titanic endowments of our elite schools. What is the schools’ interest in this new proposed auction?

Well, they want more. Twenty, thirty, forty billion dollars: not enough. They bombard their graduates with pleas to make big yearly gifts; they scream bloody murder if you propose upping their taxes a tad; they talk poor all the time.

(By the way – these schools are not simply victims of their own success, but also of the world’s failure. Keep in mind that most countries – even rich sexy developed ones like Italy – have almost uniformly shitty and corrupt universities. I assume you already know this, but as a reminder: If you open up places at truly great, storied schools for auction — as one of Harvard’s money managers has proposed — you’re going to get a flood of spectacular bids from almost every country in the world. Beats there a Colombian drug lord’s heart so weak as not to want Isabel at Yale?)

It’s already pretty hard to distinguish between Princeton and Gstaad; once the auction is up and running you’re going to create enclaves of such landmark ostentation that a tourism industry will grow around them, generating yet more millions for the schools. Instead of Don DeLillo’s South Bronx Surreal poverty-voyeurism bus tour, Princeton by Copter will waft you – in the superrich’s favorite mode of transportation – over the leafy bejeweled campus.

… you can be forgiven for special admissions procedures for the children of big donors.

… it’s Ground Zero (well, Ground 37.6 Billion), and the multitude of comments after the article – about the possibility that Harvard will gradually phase out all fraternities and other private clubs – expresses better than almost anything else the deep structure of – one social type shaped by – institutions like Harvard (for similar observations about Princeton, go here).

(Hm. Someone seems to have removed the Crimson article’s comment thread. Why?)

Given the crucial importance of secretive sadistic clubs in the formation of super-predators like the man of the hour, Marc Kasowitz (he “brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.”) and super-predators generally, UD assures you that America’s master-of-the-universe-nurseries are not really in danger. You couldn’t have Lehman Brothers/Dick Fuld et al without them. So relax.

But the comment section of the Crimson article is rife with anxiety. Nervously eyeing Harvard’s endowment of close to forty billion dollars (for a 22,000-student school), the commenters express fear that this palty sum will be further reduced by angry alumni withholding gifts. The article quotes a Harvard report on the matter calling Bowdoin and Williams (both have gotten rid of frats and similar clubs) “peer institutions,” which sets off another round of worry and sarcasm in the comments (“Williams and… Bowdoin – … 1.3 and 2.26 billion dollar endowments respectively… are PERFECT comparisons to Harvard… Thanks for enlightening us.”)

People are scared because they think Harvard might actually do it. And since everyone imitates Harvard, everyone might do it. But Harvard won’t do it, because without the clubs we couldn’t have hypercapitalism. Shutting them down would be the moral equivalent of war.

…endowment!

… to a university with a hedge fund down the street.

Insanely rich obsessively money-hoarding Harvard (closing in on $40 billion) is jest ’bout fit to burst with all that dough; and some folks – I mean, hah hah, jest some folks, but, still, some folks – been saying that they got themselves so “fat, rich, and stupid” (says here) that they jest don’t know what all to do with it (ain’t like there’s a world of pain out there they might give some of it to or whatever!) so they been handing it out like candy to anyone who happens to work at the investment fund…

And well that plus other shit that tends to attach to the ownership by one university – one anything – of forty billion dollars seems to have embarrassed Harvard to the point where they’re kind of trying to make it all go away by outsourcing their investment activity.

Now UD‘s here to tell you that Harvard’s gonna be disappointed if it thinks that a non-profit which hoards obscene wealth except for what it hands out in twenty-million-dollar a year salaries to its investment managers will be less noticeable to journalists and alumni and the tax-paying public after it moves this activity off campus. UD wants you to know that Harvard’s greed and depravity – and the absurd lengths to which it goes to maintain this greed and depravity – will continue to be front and center, wherever it locates itself.

… come into conflict with some of its employees. Grudgingly, Harvard arrives at a tentative agreement with its dining workers.

[O]ne of the Harvard endowment’s managers earned more than $11 million in 2013. The school’s president, Drew Faust, makes in the upper six figures, but also has access to perks like an official residence and retirement benefits that take total compensation north of a million dollars annually…

Yet at the same time as the school’s top officials have pulled in lofty salaries and as big corporations beyond school gates have rebounded in the ensuing years, hourly-wage workers have continued to struggle, with median weekly earnings just surpassing a 2009 peak this March. Elite universities, which employ both highly compensated, highly respected academic leaders and low-wage workers who sometimes feel invisible, offer a depressing illustration of the widening gap between the richest and the poorest Americans.

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.

A Song of Praise to Harvard
Overseer Morris Zukerman
And the Ghost of Finn Caspersen
And Countless Other Harvard
Benefactors Like Them —
From the American Taxpayer

Dodge fiercely, Harvard,
Dodge, dodge, dodge!
Demonstrate to us your skill.
Albeit you possess the cash,
Nonetheless we foot the bill!

Endowment’s almost up to forty bill
Tax breaks plus tax evasion filled the till –
How jolly!
Caspersen and Zukerman
Dodge, dodge, dodge!

Caspersen stole one hundred mill
Zukerman forty five
How many of those gains got-ill
Helped Harvard U to thrive?

We payers love to play our part
To keep you tax exempt
The thought of helping donor-thieves
Makes all of us verklempt.

Clawbacks, UD has come to know, ‘ardly hever ‘appen (to quote Eliza Doolittle), but it’s fun to watch universities who could have danced all night with Bernard Madoff (Yeshiva U.) or Finn Caspersen (Harvard) studiously avoid looking at their dance card when the financial shit hits the fan.

Caspersen, who a few years ago committed suicide with the feds on his tail, was able to afford the largest contribution in the history of Harvard Law School by allegedly hiding in Liechtenstein a hundred million or so of the tax dollars he owed us.

As American taxpayers, we’re able to help struggling non-profits in not one but two ways: tax exemption and tax evasion. What a good feeling.

It’s even better to know that the next generation of Harvard-affiliated Caspersens features a son just arrested at LaGuardia Airport (Caspersens really don’t like facing up to consequences) for defrauding investors (including charities) of $95 million through fake investments.

Madoff’s father was also a white-collar criminal. These father and son white collar criminal stories are always touching. They always make UD think of those wonderful Philippe Patek watch ads.

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.

…[see post directly below this one] still duns you.

Just a few weeks ago Harvard received the largest donation in the college’s history [which adds significantly to its current endowment of close to thirty-five billion dollars], but recent Harvard grads are nevertheless still getting [donation] requests.