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saved link:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/StudyHall_Discuss/upload/091001-141849.harvard/

original link:

http://chronicle.com/article/Think-Tank-The-Veritas/48590/

What happens when the gods of high finance dump a gigantic pile of gold on the richest university in the world?

The answer is that the university reveals its true self. It shows the world what it cares about—and what it doesn't.

Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

When the thermostat gambit failed to make up for the $10-billion hit, Harvard waited until the campus emptied out for the summer and then laid off almost 300 clerical and technical workers. The top administrators who lost the money and the full-time faculty members who received the money were unscathed.

That's because the real priority of elite higher education, as the receding tide of money has exposed, is the greater glory of elite higher education and the administrators and faculty members who work there.

And when those cuts happen, as they must, Harvard and its peers should take the chance to assess why they made the choices they made with their huge piles of gold, and how long they can keep making them in the future.

They are, without a doubt, extremely valuable institutions that contribute much in the way of science, scholarship. and culture. They make the world a better place. But they've mistaken their good fortune and great fortunes for virtue, and have lost their way.

An institution dedicated to accumulating more money and prestige? There are no limits to those needs. They can never be satisfied.

That unquenchable thirst for resources, which is by no means unique to Harvard, has spread throughout the larger body of American higher education. Every state and city has its would-be Ivies now, striving for ways to build a heap of cash, not admit as many undergraduates as possible, and charge more tuition to those who remain.

The university needs to learn them again and to get back to the simpler, smaller, more important task of helping people learn.





Randy