What kind of person has a plural first name anyway?
Infuriating. Maybe if we took the highest paid, say 10,00 or so, CEOs and others, and took them outside in the parking lot and shot them in the back of the head we might make some progress. I know, I'm willing to try guillotines first.
That's article is excellent, but I'm not sure I can agree with this.
No doubt the lawyers and MBAs who run Johns Hopkins and so many other universities are acting sincerely in the best interest of the institutions as they see it.
The article gave me plenty of reasons for doubt. I'm not sure "ineptitude" is the right word -- corrupt and self-dealing seems to me to be better descriptions of the university leaders' actions
That's not a very convincing article. Paying executives less and putting the endowment in index funds wouldn't save them from having a big problem when their operations are hugely disrupted and most of their revenue streams go off a cliff. Hiring freezes are going to be a fact of life in a lot of places for a while, raises are a pleasant memory, and suspending retirement contributions seems like a reasonable alternative to cutting current compensation (which we're expecting here). There's plenty of good bitching to be done about universities, but thinking that something like Hopkins just needs to look more like a liberal arts college is not a sensible approach.
With a 6 billion dollar endowment? We haven't done anything drastic yet, and our endowment is in tiddlywinks territory.
This is my uni, and the author is a friend. Daniels really is an epically bad president, at least for those of us not in the med school. He's alienated most of the arts and sciences faculty by imposing a new level of review in an already very long tenure process, and he's alienated large chunks of the city by pushing through the private police force bill, which he's now had to suspend for two years. Buying the Newseum building was a terrible idea. I could go on, and maybe will if I have more time later. But Daniels is terrible above and beyond the typical modern university president. Mike Bloomberg likes him, though, so he's untouchable as far as the board of trustees is concerned.
I can't even type my own name, apparently. Daniels annoys me that much.
The weird thing is what's the point of having an enormous endowment if you can't use it for a once-in-a-century emergency? If Bloomberg gave $1.8 Billion last year, why won't he just cover a $100 million dollar shortfall for again a once-in-a-century event? The billionaire-driven donor world is all about flash and ego, and no one gives a shit about the important normal stuff. It's the same reason we have terrible classroom shortages: you can only fundraise for flashy things and the state stopped paying for buildings 50 years ago, so there's no way to build classrooms.
Wait, there's more than one epically bad university president named Daniels? (Neither is my school, my president seems just an average amount of terrible, and seems fine in comparison to presidents named Daniels.)
They always spin some bullshit about how the endowment is legally restricted but somehow that doesn't prevent them from investing it in third order shale fossil derivatives.
If they spent 10% of the endowment it would bring them back to the value it was in mid-2018 when no one seemed to think the school was in mortal danger of failing.
Something, something, dissolution of the monasteries.
I am pretty sure the major consequence of Covid will be that no one ever needs to build classrooms again because classes worked great when nearly all had a major zoom component.
14:. We won't need universities because it turns out knowledge is useless.
Bloomberg gave $1.8 Billion last year
I felt good about sending Ohio State much less than half of that.
10: That Bloomberg donation appears, from a quick Google search, to have been to endow a fund for financial aid for low and moderate income students. Doesn't seem particularly flashy or ego-driven beyond what's intrinsic in being in a position to give $1.8 billion, and does end up funding the boring normal stuff, but only as students attend using the aid.
I felt good about sending Ohio State much less than half of that.
Dude, you got conned. Its THE Ohio State.
They've always cashed checks written to "Ohio State."
Pretty sure they'd cash checks written to Oklahoma State if they got their hands on some.
The Parking Enforcement people will cash checks to "You greedy fucks."
20 Ha, in fact the staff in that office all have tentacles.
On a much tinier scale, our university, with an endowment you can't find with a microscope, is in an uproar because of some "furloughs" (for faculty, straight-up pay cuts) announced in a 7pm email last night. The common thread with the Hopkins case is a terrible president and board of trustees (The BOT backed, no, pushed the president in all his crappy decisions), who moved the school to a bigger football conference, which move committed us to expanding our stadium, conspicuously half empty already at games, by an additional 14,000 empty seats when all projections said we were soon going to drop off a cliff in enrollment. It's been strangely Trumpian. The administration did everything about this furlough plan in secret, stonewalled or lied in response to questions, went to the state capitol to get their secret plan approved, and then sprung it on the staff and faculty and...it's just so dumb. Stuff like: "the furloughs will happen in the 2020-2021 academic year. But we'll start reducing paychecks in July 2020." July 2020 paychecks are money we earned in the 2019-2020 year, when there were no furloughs. I mean, is that even legal? Our first 2020-2021 paycheck won't be until September 15. In a comical gesture at making it progressive, there are four brackets ranging from 0 mandatory furlough days for someone making 33K or under, up to 20 mandatory days for people making, get this, 35,750 or over. That's right, four brackets to separate those in that tiny band of salaries (creating all sorts of salary reversals) and everyone from 35,751 to president and football coach gets treated the same. Well, actually, not the same. Twenty days furlough is a 7.5% cut for administrators on a 12 month contract, but a 10.2% cut for teaching faculty because faculty are on a 9 month contract, which was brought up over and over and they acknowledged and then did nothing about. Other schools in our same state responded with sensible, moral plans. Our state flagship school decided to start at the top, and that it could limit furloughs to the top 25% of earners, and if the budget comes up better than expected, they'll cancel the furloughs (our school won't). Sorry to ramble. It's been a lot on my mind the last 24 hours. Definite downward trajectory before COVID and it seems like they're using the crisis to do shitty stuff they maybe wanted to do anyway. I would rather see furloughs than layoffs (though there will be layoffs). We will be fine personally. But it is so 2020 to have this cabal of incompetents who can't even do math throw out this dumb plan that just says "we're going to take your wages and we REALLY don't care how we do it."
Not looking for sympathy! Just griping.
10 The weird thing is what's the point of having an enormous endowment if you can't use it for a once-in-a-century emergency?
This is what's been enraging me about, um, some university I have some familiarity with. They send their employees patronizing emails about how important it is to consider the future generations who will suffer if they spend endowment money now instead of investing it for when it's really needed. When is it ever going to be needed more than now? This is the crisis where your 60 gazillion dollars can be used to help people!
12 that doesn't prevent them from investing it in third order shale fossil derivatives
And this is the other thing that's enraging me, that we had a faculty vote to divest and the university was like "hmm, let us think about that" and came back with "we will completely decarbonize, which is even better than divesting! and we promise we'll get around to it by 2050!"
In a comical gesture at making it progressive, there are four brackets ranging from 0 mandatory furlough days for someone making 33K or under, up to 20 mandatory days for people making, get this, 35,750 or over.
I hit post too soon. Or maybe my plummeted jaw bumped the "post" button by mistake.
I spend a lot of time being enraged.
Sensible. There's a lot to be enraged about.
The monastery dissolution proposal is increasingly attractive.
The monastery dissolution proposal is increasingly attractive.
I tried that and endowed a couple of new colleges with the proceeds. Then the government changed and they closed them down. Can't win.
I went further and took them all in trust (for the King, of course) with myself and my family and friends as trustees. See my purple robe? My leopard?
Then I fixed Henry up with a wife who disgusted him, and things didn't work out so well after that.
Then I fixed Henry up with a wife who disgusted him...
He wasn't the only one disgusted, if you catch my drift.
I appreciate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's comment here. I didn't want to bother going presidential but I think I can say that I'm employed by an arm of the university if we can consider it employment when they don't pay me for months and months after promising to do so. It's not exactly nice to know they're jerks to everyone.
That really sucks. The worst a university ever did too my paycheck is make me promise not to boycott Israel.
12: While it is tempting to want to fill the budget holes with endowment spend, UPMIFA does limit flexibility. I don't know about Maryland, but in California spending more than 7% is presumptively viewed as imprudent. If a university usually spends 5% each year on endowed chairs, scholarships, etc., then that only leaves 2% headroom in the spend rate for dealing with emergencies...
32-34 are why, still, this is the only blog worth visiting.
What kind of person has a plural first name anyway?
As a graduate of that awkwardly-named school, I can only say that, Yeah, the name is sometimes hard to explain...
Also: holy crap! with its endowment.
That's what she said.
What kind of person has a plural first name anyway?
A PLURAL KIND OF PERSON.
OOPS.
FORGET I SAID THAT.
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