Drew Faust Disses Public Universities
Posted on December 7th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 19 Comments »
Business Week has an important piece about the growing wealth of “Ivy Plus” (the Ivy League, plus Stanford and MIT) universities.
Called “The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League,” the article examines the growing wealth gap between Ivy Plus-schools and public universities, especially with states freezing or cutting their support of public higher education.
More than before, impressionable students and ambitious parents have come to view college as a form of conspicuous consumption. …The increasingly plush Ivy Plus model casts into sharp relief the travails of America’s public instituions of higher learning, which educate 75% of the country’s college students. While the Ivies, which account for less than 1% of the total, lift their spending into the stratosphere, many public colleges and universities are struggling to cope with rising enrollments in an era when most states are devoiting a dwindling public share of their budgets to higher ed.
…The wealth gap between the Ivies and everyone else has never been wider. The $5.7 billion in investment gains generated by Harvard’s endowment for the year that ended June 30 exceeeded the total endowment assets of all but six U.S. universities, five of which were Ivy Plus.…
One consequence of the wealth gap: Ivy Plus schools are increasingly able to raid public universities for their best and brightest scholars. Moreover, Ivy Plus schools are able to fund campus expansions and research ventures that public universities can’t in the current budget climate.
When Business Week asked Drew Faust for her thoughts on this phenomenon, she responded that non-Ivy Plus schools should “really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious” as those of Harvard and its peers.
Ouch. One knows what she means, and good for her for tackling a tough question, but it’s very hard to make such a remark without coming across as patronizing. Nice little public schools, you should build up your creative writing departments. And a pat on the head to go with it.
The question that Faust’s response begs, I think, isâwell, there are more than one. Do rich universities have any societal obligation to poorer ones? (Because after all, not everyone can go to Harvard.) Is it a good thing for scientific research to be so heavily concentrated on seven or eight campuses? Does such a concentration benefit the universities involved more than it benefits the average American, who is, after all, generally paying for this federally-funded research? And what happens to a place like Harvard when it becomes so heavily financially oriented toward big science? How does that focus change the university and turn it into something quasi-educational, quasi-corporate?
As so often seems to be the case, one gets the sense that none of these big questions are publicly discussed at Harvard….because to express any reservations in public might slow down the money train.
19 Responses
12/7/2024 3:40 pm
Ouch indeed. That is so unlike her. I’ll bet it is one sentence clipped from a long interview, maybe even a response to a “Would you say..?” type of question. Be that as it may, she will now have to apologize for saying it, as she will need to work with the heads of those public Us, and it represents exactly the image of Harvard she is trying to get away from, telling others how not to compete with it. For someone who has carefully avoided making public statements, this is not a nice way to begin.
12/7/2024 5:26 pm
I think the rich people have the carpet here. Too soon I go to the house of dog. Much hurt, much hurt. Sand and cut eyes. God is super.
12/7/2024 6:17 pm
huh?
12/7/2024 6:37 pm
C’mon Rich, get to the real story. It’s in today’s Times, Sports section. A-Rod is a mean grasping South Florida slumlord!
12/7/2024 9:02 pm
Maybe she’s admitting that Harvard is unable to get its act together in the social sciences and humanities, and recognizing that public univesities are doing a better job in a field wide open.
Perhaps the neglect that the humanities and social sciences experienced under Summers will continue, because the source of the neglect supersedes the President…
12/7/2024 9:24 pm
The article misrepresents Harvard when it says:
“The Ivies’ biggest expense category by far is labor. At Harvard, compensation and benefits accounted for 49% of its $3.2 billion in operating expenses in 2006-07. Although salary gains have consistently outpaced inflation, it is the addition of new teaching positions that is chiefly responsible for driving up the cost of instruction. Harvard, the largest of the Ivies, employs 2,164 faculty members, 55% more than in 1997-98. All of the Ivies increasingly are emphasizing small-group learning, independent study, and hands-on experience. “It’s a much more personal connection between teacher and student, and a lot less delivering education in large lecture halls with armies of teaching assistants,” says Carol L. Folt, a Dartmouth biology professor who doubles as its dean of faculty. “
12/7/2024 10:46 pm
Anon 8:24
Why does it misrepresent Harvard?
12/7/2024 11:32 pm
Certainly with the following, Sam:
“Harvard, the largest of the Ivies, employs 2,164 faculty members, 55% more than in 1997-98.”
That’s just nonsense, at least for FAS. Anyone know the real number? Well under 10%, I would guess
12/8/2024 10:32 am
You are right Professor Thomas. In some professional schools the total number of faculty is in decline, with the consequent increase in student/faculty ratios. The model seems to be classes that pack hundreds of students to a room and less seminars and tutorials. Just the opposite of what the article describes.
12/8/2024 2:16 pm
Richard Thomas,
I was simply asking the question because I didn’t understand what the poster was driving at. Not only was that number (the faculty) incorrect and totally misleading, but if one reads the article, many other things are incorrect. That shouldn’t be a surprise. In Business Week, whenever there is a story on a subject you know something about, you find it is replete with errors.
I think Richard B’s comments were interesting, particularly his last sentence “As so often seems to be the case, one gets the sense that none of these big questions are publicly discussed at Harvard….because to express any reservations in public might slow down the money train.”
There is,very very unfortunately, an arms race going on with the usual suspects (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia et al). In the short term it doesn’t matter about a few billion here or there (pace Senator Dirkson), but in the long run (think 25 or 50 years), if this keeps up the money train is an absolute necessity… again unfortunately so. Additionally, because there is no long term rational scheme with regard to the endowment payout (and therefore the long term budgeting and planning process is non existent, particularly in the capital projects area), the money train must be continually tapped.
What a poor system!
12/8/2024 9:19 pm
Yes it is a mad system for many reasons. Sam Spektor correctly identifies some of them. The previous poster is also on target indicating that the quality of teaching is not a priority. In addition bureaucratic growth is out of control in several academic units. Those who argue that Harvard is no longer a University have a point.
12/8/2024 11:13 pm
OK, Sam Spektor, quite right, and I fear your arms race pervades absolutely everything and is endangering the University’s mission.
Witness the following, from the Gazette’s obituary of my colleague Zeph Stewart:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2007/12.06/07-stewart.html
“As master of Lowell House, Stewart greatly emphasized the importance of community. He welcomed the advent of women into the house.”
Here is what we actually submitted to the Gazette:
“As Master of Lowell House, he put great emphasis on the importance of community, and having witnessed the effects of the Vietnam War on student life he worked hard to help the House continue its humane mission in the face of the fundamental changes that occurred in those years. In this connection he also welcomed the advent of women into the House.”
This was one of only two substantive changes to the text we submitted, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that censorship occurred. Why? Can it be that we don’t want to risk offending whoever out there might be offended out of giving by being made to remember there was once a time when Harvard students risked their comfort and more to work against their country’s involvement in an unjust war? Shouldn’t the sentence in question have been the one sentence that was untouchable?
I post this because the excision impoverished the memorial of my colleague and dear friend, a man who gave 50 years of his life to Harvard, and deserved better of it than he here got.
12/9/2024 8:28 am
I think you’re misinterpreting the Gazette’s move. Ironic that, in a thread on accuracy in the media, you criticize the Gazette for removing the following: “having witnessed the effects of the Vietnam War on student life he worked hard to help the House continue its humane mission in the face of the fundamental changes that occurred in those years.” Is this verifiable? Where are the facts? I’m not sure I follow the logic of the sentence, and, if I had been the reporter, I would have removed those words, unless there had been a way to connect those dots in a way that would not have appeared as editorializing.
12/9/2024 3:07 pm
Regarding Business Week’s count of Harvard faculty, it seems to be using the number of faculty from the 2006-2007 Harvard Fact Book: 2,163.5. This number includes all academic positions (other than TAs/TFs and non-Quad-based HMS faculty), including a range of non-tenure-track positions. If you count only tenured and tenure-track, you end up with about 1,500.
However, the 55% increase in ten years is wrong. Ten years ago, the Fact Book excluded all HMS faculty from its “University-wide” faculty count. Someone must not have looked at the data very carefully. If you do an apples-to-apples comparison (including Quad-based HMS in both counts), then the increase in ten years is about 20%.
12/9/2024 5:58 pm
Professor Thomas, thanks for sharing. What a sad example of censorship in the obituary of your friend. It speaks tons about the prevailing values in the institution.
12/9/2024 6:00 pm
Joe Levy, you are a step closer to being accurate than BW but not quite. Do an analysis school by school and you’ll see that while the situation in some has improved for many professional schools things are no better today than they were a decade ago.
12/10/2024 2:26 am
Anon 7:28 points to some problems with Richard Thomas’s prose, but instead of trying to figure out a better way of stating what Zeph Stewart did at Lowell House, the Gazette just excised the difficult part. I find it laziness, rather than “censorship”; and I don’t think it has anything to do with the “money train”, which was the lead-in.
The problem is that “the effects of the Vietnam War on student life” does not tell us anything. RT’s explanation doesn’t help, and, I must say, very very few Harvard students of my generation “risked their comfort and more” to work against the war, unless “comfort” is defined in a 2007 way as “job at Morgan, Sachs”, or some such thing. Only those who went to jail, or fled to Canada, can be so described, and those were few in number (although among them were some friends of mine).
Going to marches against the war, “striking” against the University, were not “risky”, or even particularly “courageous”, although I think they were correct actions, and I am glad my generation did (most of) them.
What were the changes that Zeph Stewart saw in the Vietnam War era in student life that he wanted to counter? There were two major ones that I can identify.
First, the nature of the student anti-war protest in those years (1966-71) was extremely emotional, including attacks on the University as an entity, on scholarship as an activity, etc. As a result, the faculty felt immediately much more alienated from the undergraduate student body. This caused a great change in Harvard College. Before this, faculty associated with the Houses would regularly drop in for meals; the Houses were the nexus of personal relations between the students and the faculty. After 1970 this happened only in formal occasions, that is, official faculty nights or senior common room dinners with invited undergraduates. This has been a permanent change in Harvard College.
Second, some animosity developed between the apolitical undergrads, of which there were plenty even in the classes of ’69 (my own) - ’74 (by which time our disengagement from Vietnam made things die down), and the politically engaged, mostly very leftist students. Since the antiwar political faction had spearheaded action against the University, all sorts of activities were shut down. (This happened in both 1969 and 1970.) I’m not talking about a right-wing/left-wing struggle, but about students who thought it inappropriate to leave classes because of factors in which they had no interest (and in which, in 1970, had no connection with the University),
against those who urged them that absenting
themselves from classes was some kind of
moral witness. But this was urged without
much reasonability, and in a confrontatory
manner.
That is, civility diminished between students.
Zeph Stewart’s worry was about both factors. In the period after 1969-71, he tried ardently to bring back an earlier, civil community, both between students and between the faculty and the undergrads. After 1969, many fewer faculty members lived in the undergraduate Houses; Zeph actively recruited some to do so at Lowell. He made sure that the tutors, resident and non-resident, had a range of political affiliations. He and his wife Diana kept to the schedule of teas that had defined Lowell House life for years, but now with a new agenda. They more than welcomed co-residence, as we called the experiment in having women (gasp!) live in the House, and Lowell was the first house to have a woman resident tutor (a philosopher, I rush to add).
Zeph Stewart also welcomed Peter Gomes to Lowell House . How the other Housemasters overlooked Rev. Gomes importance, even as a young man in 1968, is an amusing question.
I am immensely saddened by Zeph Stewart’s passing. He was a model of everything that those of us who are privileged to teach at Harvard can be.
Warren Goldfarb, FAS
Harvard College ’69 (Lowell House 1966-1969)
Member of the SCR of Lowell House 1971-1980
12/10/2024 8:48 am
Thanks Professor Goldfarb for this very helpful explanation. It is fully conssitent with the note by Linda Wertheimer and Peter Schworm in Sunday’s Globe (B3) ‘Harvard alumni fault campus apathy’. The article reports that a group of alumni led by Gilbert Doctorow are extremely concern by the lack of political awareness and participation of Harvard students.
12/10/2024 3:23 pm
“Ivy Plus” (the Ivy League, plus Stanford and MIT) universities.
I’ve seen many definitions of the Ivy Plus, but that one is probably the most restrictive. At least U of Chicago should be included.
This def. has a good deal more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_plus