Elite Universities are Hedge Funds

The article US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines by Daniel Denvir & Dennis M. Hogan (Jacobin) writes,

“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll wealthy students.”

And it’s not merit-based; they’re laundering privilege into credentials. That’s their business.

“They’re going to end up graduating students with more debt who also have comparatively less-elite credentials when they’re done.”

Well, isn’t that just perfect. What a completely predictably pathological result.

“[…] they’re spending a fraction of their endowment on the university’s operations, period. So what good is an endowment if it’s not being spent on the university? Maybe this gets to a more philosophical question about capitalism. I’m lying awake at night thinking, why do people like Jeff Bezos want and need more money than they can ever spend by orders and orders of magnitude? What drives this pursuit of a larger and larger endowment as an end unto itself, almost?”

Everything about the system in the U.S. drives it. Literally every facet of that culture drives the mindless acquisition of more, regardless of how many others suffer for it. I’ve got mine, Jack might as well be the national motto. Ethics, morality, principle—they’ve all been ground to dust and washed away. They are useless hindrances to the personal accumulation of capital.

Other people don’t matter. Other people are “other”. They deserve to lose. Everything is a game to be won.

Bigger. Better. Faster. More.

Actually, “better” doesn’t really matter. It’s a nice-to-have, I guess.

“But you hire financiers to invest your money and make money for you. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re not particularly worried about what you do with it afterward. Their job is to make it get bigger. They are simply doing their job.”

The heck with that. Why do people like these “financiers” even exist? Brcause the system promotes their creation. Why is a society OK with that? They’re like ticks or mosquitos or serial killers: they do not serve a purpose that is beneficial to society. In fact, they are actively harmful. We should be trying to limit or eliminate the damage that they do, rather than shrugging our shoulders and treating them like an unstoppable, unalterable force of nature.

“Because ultimately, who would you rather be? The person who’s living off spending 7 percent of $1 billion or the person who’s living off spending just 1 percent of $5 billion? It’s an easy choice.”

What the hell kind of question is that? NEITHER. Neither of those should exist. No wonder other socialists shit on Jacobin’s socialist cred.

“Once you start to open the door to saying you can’t invest in this because of that reason, then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, where can you ethically and equitably invest? And the answer starts to be nowhere, because there is no real ethical finance capitalism in a world where capital’s need to accumulate is causing endless depredation across the planet and has been for centuries. That’s where the need to have an endowment at all intersects with the purported mission of social good and the very liberal values that these colleges proclaim to hold.”

Yes. That is exactly correct. There is no way to reconcile those. Stop wasting time trying to find one. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

“Here in Providence, Brown has been expanding downtown and across the river, all while being exempted from property taxes, either largely or entirely.”

“Brown would like to begin to get into the game of owning a medical center because . . . what federal student loans are to colleges and universities, Medicare and Medicaid dollars are to medicine. So if you can combine those income streams, you can become very well-resourced very quickly. That, ultimately, is the goal, and I don’t think it’s entirely speculative to say that.”

So giant, tax-free endowments seek to grow by corralling even more government money into their maws. And we are powerless to stop them. We are not even ideologically equipped to consider this a problem. To the contrary, we consider this behavior to be the epitome of how the system should work: take what you can; fuck everyone else. Alpha-predator, top-of-the-food-chain stuff. Who can argue with success?

“[…] creates an environment in which the kinds of workers and students you hope to attract will feel comfortable. These things are all enabled by the kind of resources that only extremely wealthy schools have.”

No. It’s enabled by the kind of money that states have, but we choose to launder it through the wealthy, trusting in their beneficence when they redistribute a tiny fraction of it in what we hope we will consider fruitful and just directions. He’s just described trickle-down economics in what reads like very approving terms.

“These two things are intimately related: the ability of labor across the university to exercise some form of leverage to begin to contest top-down administrative decision-making, and the increasing centralization of administrative decision-making power among a small handful of extremely empowered technocrats. Which is not a term of derision; it is a term of art. These are highly trained, highly competent people. I’m not merely lobbing invective.”

This constant kowtowing to the people ruining everything is grating. They are good at a job that shouldn’t exist. Fantastic. The work they do consolidates wealth and power tremendously, and harms everyone else. It’s like admiring an assassin—you’re fine with it until they take out one of your own.

On the same topic, the article Management at California State University Is Living Large While Faculty Struggle by Matthew Ford (Jacobin) writes,

“Budgetary shortfalls are the most common justification for denying faculty salary increases, yet administrator salary increases miraculously continue to roll out regardless of budgetary constraints.”

This is the way of the world. Management tends toward an amoral criminality where its sole purpose becomes to defend its own lifestyle, salary, and pension, treating the actually essential employees of an organization as a necessary evil whose labor needs to be obtained as cheaply as possible. This is the exact opposite of how it should be: administration should be obtained as cheaply as possible, but it controls the pursestrings, so it just gives itself all of the money and hires all of its friends. There is nothing special about this. It’s just the same level of corruption that has always existed.

“If anybody is unsure where CSU management’s priorities lie, a brief glance at the new compensation package for new chancellor Mildred García should make things clear: García will receive an annual salary of $795,000, another $80,000 in deferred compensation, $8,000 per month for a housing allowance, and another $1,000 per month for a car allowance.”

There you go. She doesn’t teach, she provides no value to the actual mission of a university. She is probably really, really good at ensuring that money keeps getting shoveled in the direction of people who already have more than they know what to do with.

Good for her. America loves people like her.