This David Pozen piece is great, non-partisan, and makes use of loads of financial reasoning. Right here is only one excerpt from a wider therapy:
For all of the speak of how the trendy college has been corporatized, neoliberalized, and so forth, there hasn’t been as a lot consideration paid to the methods wherein it has been presidentialized.
The presidentialization of Columbia dates again nicely earlier than the present second. Our final president, Lee Bollinger, ran the college for over 20 years. Throughout his tenure, Bollinger oversaw the rise of a considerable administrative equipment—the ten highest paid Columbia workers, aside from surgeons, are now all senior executives—in addition to the creation of a dizzying array of analysis facilities, coverage institutes, and international packages that function roughly independently of the tutorial departments. Bollinger’s workplace additionally launched numerous smaller tasks with discretionary funds. After the riot on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, as an illustration, he got here up with the concept for a Constitutional Democracy Initiative (with which I’m affiliated) and, inside weeks, a powerful new outfit was up and working. In the meantime, essentially the most broadly consultant physique on campus, the College Senate, appeared to develop into much less related with each passing yr.
And on endowments:
Over the previous technology or so, having a big endowment has develop into one thing greater than a method to help longstanding institutional targets; it has develop into an finish in itself, a key measure of a college’s status and its president’s efficiency. And since most philanthropists don’t wish to fund boring previous working budgets, increasing the endowment is usually completed via conditional items for engaging new endeavors, as mirrored within the proliferation of extra-departmental facilities, institutes, and packages referred to above. As soon as launched, these non-tuition-receiving entities—and all the roles, school fiefdoms, and pupil alternatives that include them—solely have a tendency to extend the demand for ongoing donations.
There are additional attention-grabbing factors on the hyperlink, together with about Title IX, advisable. For the pointer I thank Anecdotal.
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