A Very Visible Swipe at ‘Super-Rich Universities’ … But What About the Rest?
Writing on the op-ed page in yesterday’s New York Times, Carroll Bogert, Harvard ‘83, had some harsh words for her alma mater. Bogert, a former journalist and now the associate director of Human Rights Watch, is upset that Harvard and "several other super-rich universities" continue to ask alumni for donations despite "sitting on top of a gargantuan pile of cash" thanks to aggressive investment of endowment funds and conservative spending practices. While acknowledging the university’s positive steps after public scrutiny from legislators, she argues they didn’t go far enough:
Last year, in the wake of Congressional hearings on the rising costs of college education, Harvard announced that it would offer financial aid even to families earning up to $180,000 a year. That was good news for middle-class parents wondering where they would find $50,000 a year for the next four. But it should be only the beginning of a brainstorm about the bigger picture of financing a private education.
Harvard is the wealthiest private institution in America except for the Gates Foundation, which has about $37 billion. But unlike the Gates Foundation, Harvard isn’t legally required to spend 5 percent of its income every year. Last year, it didn’t. Nor does it pay tax. Nor is it bound by most of the strictures of financial reporting that make spending at Gates transparent and publicly accountable.
Bogert wants Harvard and other similar schools to become more imaginative about how they use their resources. She and fellow alumni from her class have formed a group to support impoverished African universities, but she laments that their efforts have gone unaided by too many other Harvard graduates:
So where are the rest of the alumni? Why do all those clever classmates of mine continue to invest their money in an institution with such a lack of imagination about how to deploy its resources?
The main reason is probably the unparalleled networking opportunity that alumni events represent. The more money you give, the more networking events you’re invited to, and the higher the net worth of the other attendees.
But fear is another big reason. All of us hope our children will be able to go to Harvard if they want to. We’re not sure if anybody up in Cambridge notices our paltry checks when David Rockefeller is writing one for $100 million, but an awful lot of people continue to write them anyway. It’s a small price to pay — a kind of soft blackmail — to keep options open for little Max and Sophie.
Bogert’s point is well taken, but I fear she may be throwing the baby out with the bath water. That is, sure, Harvard and Princeton and Yale and the like do benefit from alumni giving that gets dumped into an endowment never to be heard from again. But vast numbers of schools across the country are doing wonderful, innovative things for students and communities with far fewer resources. Yet because they’re not the Ivies and their alumni aren’t sitting in editors’ offices at the country’s most influential media outlets, they fly under the radar. I’d hate to see Bogert’s argument reach these schools’ graduates, whose help is desperately required but who too often see their alma maters as not needing the assistance.
Harvard may not need its alumni’s annual fund gifts at this point; Worcester State College surely does. It would be a shame if Worcester’s alumni heeded Bogert’s message and closed their wallets in a mistaken huff. | 501(c)
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1 opinion for A Very Visible Swipe at ‘Super-Rich Universities’ … But What About the Rest?
If your argument’s this weak, don’t be surprised when it collapses «
May 28, 2008 at 10:01 am
[…] argument’s this weak, don’t be surprised when it collapses Jump to Comments If this is the best argument that can be made for holding one’s fire on the subject of huge unspent university endowments–that it […]
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