Should Harvard Give Away Money?
Posted on August 28th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 14 Comments »
Professors concerned about the widening money gap between Harvard and everywhere else are proposing some novel ways to spend Harvard’s moneyâincluding giving some to less-fortunate schools.
Margaret Soltan, an English professor at George Washington University whose blog, “University Diaries,” can be found at www.insidehighered.com, suggested Harvard start giving grants with all that money. She specifically mentioned Florida Southern College, the Lakeland school that has the largest collection of Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings, some of which have fallen into disrepair.
Sounds like a good investment to me….
14 Responses
8/28/2007 8:45 am
One of the things that always amazes me is that the Cambridge Public School System is so poor. I’m sure that Florida Southern is a deserving institution, but if I had to choose I think I’d start a bit closer to home. No doubt there are difficulties, political and otherwise, that would make it awkward for Harvard to intervene in the Cambridge school system. And I’m sure that there are many sources for the problems that the Cambridge schools endure, at least some of which are not principally monetary. But there is something very wrong about the juxtaposition of a University with Harvard’s reputation and a school system with Cambridge’s. Harvard could do worse than to try to find a way to help out here. (I remember hearing that Amy Gutman, at Penn, has made interaction with the local school system a priority there.)
That said, whenever the question of how to spend the endowment comes up administrators are quick to emphasize that it’s not as big, nor certainly as flexible, as the brute numbers suggest. Tubs on their own bottom, thousands of individual pots, and so on. I don’t know much about these issues first hand, but I would certainly be interested to hear more. Any administrators out there?
Sean
8/28/2007 9:24 am
Although this is a well-motivated suggestion, I am worried about the increased tendency in this country to treat problems the government should be handling and give them over to private hands.
8/28/2007 9:30 am
Fair enough, 9:24. I certainly agree that the government should be responsible enough to take care of the public school system. But since it evidently isn’t, in this case, and since, for the sake of argument, we’re discussing philanthropic ways to spend the Harvard endowment, throwing some of it into the local schools seems an idea worth pursuing.
Sean
8/28/2007 10:25 am
9:24 here-I didn’t mean to rain on your suggestion, just to make the larger point. Given the lack of effort governments in the US are making in this area, one has to welcome any help to public education that comes along.
8/28/2007 10:29 am
before proffering a ludicrous suggestion, perhaps understanding the university’s budget, operating expenses, and restrictions on the use of the endowment funds is in order?
it’s sloppy and mistaken to assume a pot of money should be immediately spent. where’s the financial stewardship?
8/28/2007 12:32 pm
It’s also sloppy thinking to think a pot of money exists. The endowment is of course the sum of thousands of endowed funds, the vast majority of which are specifically designated for functions determined by the donors, who gave their own money in the belief it would be used for the purposes designated. So if my grandfather gave, in memory of his mother, $50,000 to be used to collect library materials on the French Revolution, it would be illegal, and unethical, to allocate the payout on that endowment for the acquisition of library materials on Victorian poetry, let alone send it to the Cambridge school system or Florida Southern College, needy as they may be.
The fact is that that bequest, even with a generous annual payout, has not been able to keep up with the inflation in print materials (double-digit in some years), which means scholarly materials have not been collected as well as they were in the past. Unrestricted funds have not made up the shortfall, so the result is a deterioration in a central teaching and research operation of the University.
That example was hypothetical. This is real:
Harvard Colege Library book acquisition snapshot (volumes added, by language of publication):
English Social Sciences
FY 05 FY 06 FY 07 decline
10,579 8,679 8,020 24%
French, Italian (all areas)
FY 05 FY 06 FY 07 decline
14,985 15,102 12,245 18%
For all materials there was an overall drop of 5.5%. The changes, by the way, have nothing to do with changing cultures, e.g. the universe of print materials does not decrease with increased digital publication.
Somewhere on this list someone said such consequences are a function of the University’s deciding there are higher priorities. I have nowhere seen that view articulated, and the FAS Standing Committee on the Library made a vigorous report a couple of years ago, essentially arguing that more resources were needed throughout the system.
The library is but one, very important, example. In short, there is plenty for the endowment to do in order to maintain Harvard’s pre-eminence as a research and teaching institution, without its venturing into illegal and unethical uses of the funds entrusted to it. What needs scrutiny is the use of funds that does not contribute to the teaching and research profile of the institution.
8/28/2007 2:39 pm
On a not-unrelated note, our old Crimson friend Zach Seward has an article in the WSJ about rich alums of rich univs who prefer giving to smaller, poorer colleges nearby:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118826200944010463.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
8/28/2007 7:28 pm
My post of 12:32 gave too short a schrift to Sean Kelly’s excellent observations about the paradox with regard to Harvard and the Cambridge schools. My point had more to do with what the endowment can properly be used for. I chose to get a house in the western suburbs in 1987 because I couldn’t afford to pay for private schools and the Cambridge schools were not great then. This has changed some, but there should be more cooperation between the two, and to give him credit LS did some outreach there as I recall, though to what effect I don’t know
8/28/2007 8:53 pm
Apologies for moving this thread off-track. The Crimson story linked to below is actually a big deal. Would love to hear your thoughts. Surprising that no one has mentioned Expos and its future yet; strategic silence from the humanists?
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519440
8/28/2007 9:05 pm
More silence out of ignorance, I think, 8:53. Those colleagues with whom I have spoken, like me, know no more than you or we have gotten from the Crimson. There’s obviously something going on here. Btw, Expos is a College-wide requirement, attached to no Department, charged with teaching students to write well, and therefore of equal interest to everyone in FAS, not just ‘the humanists’, right?
8/29/2007 9:57 am
Harvard continues to be second best. Whis is not so bad, I guess. From the students’ point of view it’s a value institution -because it’s cheaper than Princeton and Yale. From the institution’s point of view it’s an expensive second, considering how much higher the value of it’s endowment. From society’s point of view -considering the subsidy that tax exemption represents on all the land Harvard owns and in the value of the endowment- Harvard is probably a much worse value than any of the top ten in the US News and World Report.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519439
8/29/2007 10:25 am
If you go by a per-student count, Harvard’s endowment, at least a year ago, was fourth, while Princeton’s was first.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._colleges_and_universities_by_endowment
If you don’t factor in the presence or absence of Medical, Law, Business, Education Schools, all of which are run by their shares of the endowment pay out, gross endowment figures are meaningless. I’m happy for Princeton to be first, by any and all such criteria, as long as I don’t have to move there.
8/29/2007 10:27 am
Great thing, tenure. You won’t ever have to move to Princeton, RT.
8/29/2007 10:40 am
10.25am is absolutely right. It makes no sense to lump all the endowment just as it makes no sense to speak of rankings in an abolute sense. These comparisons need to be made specifically for the college, for each graduate school and for each professsional school. It’s harder to apportion the endowment to different graduate programs in GSAS. It is, however, possible to do this for the College, for the GSAS as a whole and for each Professional School. In some fields Harvard fares better than in others. It’s clearly not all a matter of endowment size.