Summers on the Endowment
Posted on January 31st, 2008 in Uncategorized | 20 Comments »
In what is apparently an interview with the Crimson, Larry Summers took exception to the idea, which has some currency in Washington, of mandated endowment payout levels.
âI sympathize with the impulse, but worry about straitjackets,â he said.
Summers also claimed that he had tried to raise the income level under which a student could get free tuition to $100,000, but had been resisted by the faculty and overruled by the Corporation.
If so, that would be a rare instance where the Corporation did not do what Summers told it to.
A side note: I think it’s fair to say that Summers is not taking the Derek Bok, post-presidency approach of not commenting on university matters so as not to create tensions with the person currently holding the job….
20 Responses
1/31/2008 8:58 am
if you think he’s been vocal, you ain’t seen notin’ yet.
1/31/2008 9:25 am
Perhaps as Summers becomes more vocal he could also address why he thinks graduate education in the schools of education and government took a turn for the worst under his watch.
1/31/2008 11:50 am
I don’t recall his putting the issue (free tuition up to $100,000) before the faculty (which has no say in such matters), and I certainly don’t recall any faculty resistance. Does anyone else? Why would faculty resist? Looks like the same old game. No pathei mathos here.
1/31/2008 12:30 pm
Richard paraphrased the Crimson, which actually says, “[Summers] faced strong opposition within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” Very likely that means that Summers wanted to do it, told whoever was dean at that time to do it and to pay for it out of FAS funds, and the dean said he couldn’t afford it. Many of Summers’ initiatives were not fully funded by the central administration and the deans had to decide what not to fund in order to fund the things the president wanted. This may be one where he got some pushback.
1/31/2008 12:44 pm
The Crimson goes on to say “Summers claimed that many in the faculty members [sic] were critical of his original plan for HFAI.” Now it appears the Crimson may be having some editorial issues at a critical juncture here, and it’s too bad there is no direct quotation from Summers on this point. But what Richard Thomas says is correct. In fact, the initial resistance to increased financial aid for low-income students came from Summers himself. As I report in “Excellence Without a Soul,” “Summers announced the new program in a media blitz, but credited neither William Bowen, who had done extensive research on low-income studentsâ decreasing access to higher education, nor James Engell, who documented the seriousness of the issue for a skeptical Summers many months before the program was announced.” - Harry Lewis
1/31/2008 2:49 pm
Just to add my two cents here: I can also state that Summers never brought this issue to the faculty. It wasn’t brought to Faculty Council, and it certainly wasn’t brought to the full FAS meetings. If he discussed it with a dean, we never heard about it.
1/31/2008 5:51 pm
No matter who discusses this stuff at Harvard, from an outside perspective a lot of this is moving around deck chairs on the Titantic, because the vast majority of Harvard applicants are turned away. Stimulating even more high SAT scorers to apply and giving a few dozen more upper-middle-class offspring a windfall low cost ride if they happen to get in just makes it harder for lower-income applicants to get in and means many more rejection letters to send out. Harvard with its small elite classes cannot make a dent in the country’s problems of affordable access to college for the vast majority. And don’t say that Harvard helps by getting others to act too, because most poorer institutions will probably just shift resources from lower-income students and from vital functions to pay higher grants to upper-middle-class students in an effort to keep up with the Ivies.
1/31/2008 6:27 pm
Harvard helps by getting others to act too.
1/31/2008 8:11 pm
From the Crimson Guide to Shopping Period…
And if youâd prefer a shot of current events with a heavy dose of academic star power, then check out Economics 1400: âThe Contents of Globalization: Issues, Actors, and Decisions,â taught by former University President Lawrence H. Summers and Kennedy School professor Lant Pritchett.
According to its syllabus, the class will examine the social, political and economic impact of globalization in higher education.
The course intends to cover such topics as managing the faculty, assisting your friends, international legal outflows, the slow warming of the corporation, scandals and labor mobility, and hedge fund investment.
1/31/2008 8:20 pm
Don’t be such a glib bastard, Eagle Who Stands. That’s childish stuff. Obviously you’re contemptuous of the man’s point-usually you are-but it’s worth addressing: Aren’t we in store for a steep rise in applications, and with it an equivalent number of rejections? Do you enjoy being faculty at a school that rejects 92% of its applicants and rising?
1/31/2008 10:10 pm
That last comment is so bizarre. Suppose the Red Sox, who sell out every game, got religion and felt badly that poor people could no longer attend their games. They decide to discount their tickets based on income to make the attendees (sorry, the congregation) more representative of the fan base. Now twice as many people who try to buy tickets, can’t. But a few people who used to go to Pawsox games now go to Fenway games instead. Would you be as viciously angry and resentful? Would you curse the Red Sox for having done it?
1/31/2008 10:23 pm
“Viciously angry and resentful”… where’d that come from? Talk about bizarre — if you can’t see qualitative differences between the Red Sox (a business) and Harvard (a university, although Robert Brustein used to call it a bank), and their respective missions, then I’m sorry I can’t help you.
This is what gives economists-if you’re not one, your analysis is-a bad name; always these theoretically apt models and analogies that, frankly, lack common sense and some might say humanity.
1/31/2008 11:50 pm
Well, you have to wonder why every time the numbers are released, there’s all this crowing-that’s what it sounds like-about historic numbers of applicants, lowest acceptance rate ever, etc. In truth I should think that working in an admissions office where you reject 19 of 20 applicants would be quite demoralizing; maybe it is.
Explain what I want? Resources devoted to poor and genuinely middle-income people, bearing in mind that of course most applicants, rich or poor, will still be rejected. At the same time, thinking about the effect one’s financial strength has on other, poorer colleges (i.e. all but a dozen or 20). It’s the latter that I think was missing in this last effort (getting back to 4.51’s post which started things off) — a certain Harvard heedlessness which might reverse the general direction away from merit aid right back to it, meaning that those who get in to Harvard are luckier than ever, but many many students at other places will have even *less* coming to them. Which Harvard naturally does not desire (who would?) but doesn’t it seem the inevitable result?
2/1/2024 12:28 pm
The Senate is not the only part of the government watching what colleges do. Let’s assume the rich colleges got together to work with the others, “heed” them, to use your term. Suppose they determined their prices and other business practices sensitively so as not to hurt the others. Be team players with their riches. Problem is, it would be illegal. Cooperation on prices to prevent any college from getting too far out ahead of the others would be anticompetitive collusion. That would likely bring on an antitrust action. It has happened in the past. The antitrust division of the DOJ thinks of colleges as just another competitive industry.
2/1/2024 9:30 pm
anyone who read the crimson correction would see that Summers never suggested faculty opposition to hfai but was taking a swipe at Kirby and the stifling fas bureaucracy.
2/1/2024 9:32 pm
anyone who read the crimson correction would see that summers never criticised the faculty on this-he blamed fas leadership-which means kirby and univesity hall bean counters.
2/2/2024 11:03 am
University leaders and economists and other scholars need to explain clearly why academic admissions and financial aid markets are not at all like regular commodities markets. They work in opposite ways in many key dimensions: higher prices do not increase supply and competition among universities to attract/give windfalls to better credentialed high school seniors can constrict access overall and hurt equity. It would not be collusion to get the facts and accurate ideas out there. Where are the university leaders, like the giants of old, who will do this on behalf of the whole society?
2/2/2024 11:43 am
Many great university leaders (i.e. Derek Bok) have been replaced by university managers. A consequence of a two-pronged process: a) the current fashion of bringing in people who don’t understand academia to these positions, and b) the capture of the academy by MBA’s who in various consulting roles have taken strategic planning roles. The confluence of these two processes in the same institutions is particularly disastrous, as it was at Harvard during Summers. The appointment of Drew Faust corrects the first of these two prongs, we’ll see if she can also correct the second.
2/2/2024 4:10 pm
Sorry to come in again with a quote from EWAS, but I said it all a couple of years ago (page 18): “The alumni, trustees, and professors who recognize what has happened can apply enough pressure to steer the ship to a new heading. Changing direction requires candor about the forces that have caused the errant course. It also requires leadership that views the university idealistically, as something more than a business and something better than a slave to the logic of economic competition.” And Jim Engell said it before I did. - Harry Lewis
2/2/2024 4:46 pm
What is the evidence that Faust is righting the ship? She is the one who launched this new round of competitive craziness with super-subsidy windfalls to a few upper middle class kids who manage to get into Harvard. This inflates the numbers of applicants to an institution that already rejects more than 90% and puts hundreds of colleges and universities without big endowments under greater stress, making it harder for them to help students from modest backgrounds. At the same time Faust insulted state universities in Business Week. Her financial aid moves merely whet Washington’s appetite for more regulatory meddling to the detriment of all universities. Inside Harvard, her administration is pushing business practices and consultants big time. She is Summers without the rough edges but also without the smarts.