Harvard Totally #$%@*by Choire
While people are focused on the AIG story and the Sarah Palin story in the August issue of Vanity Fair, there's actually something even more amazing in it – a Nina Munk piece on Harvard's endowment. It is only online in "preview" form, but we have something called a "subscription." What's going on up at the old school? "Radical change is coming to Harvard. Fewer professors, for one thing. Fewer teaching assistants, janitors and support staff. Shuttered libraries." The list goes on. At Harvard! Which is, to quote a hedge fund manager who "counts Harvard among his investors," totally "fucked." What went wrong, according to Munk? Ridiculous, ill-advised expansion in this decade, of 6.2 million square feet, at an outrageous, unbelievable cost of $4.3 billion. Also, their annual budget, which was $2.1 billion in 1998, was, ten years later, $3.5 billion. Spendy! Oh and also any student whose parents earn less than $180,000 a year pays no more than 10% of tuition. Harvard's endowment was an astounding $36.9 billion one year ago. Its debt now is $6 billion, which, Munk calculates, means that Harvard must pay $517 million a year until 2038 to pay it off. December 5, 2009 Copyright © 2009 The Awl
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