Harvard University and Hillsdale College have a lot more in common than you might expect: Both are home to many good and serious students and faculty, neither is very much like the cartoon of itself outsiders see, and they both have the one big important thing that kept Donald Regan from getting bossed around by Nancy Reagan—it is, after all, to Ronald Reagan’s irascible treasury secretary that we reportedly owe the popularization of the term “f—k-you money.”
“Why does Harvard need such a big endowment?” people used to ask. “Why is Hillsdale so insistent about not taking government money?” others demanded.
Harvard’s endowment was right around $64 billion at last count, equal to about 10 years of the school’s operating expenses. Those investments produce billions of dollars in income for the university, which uses some of the proceeds for operating expenses and reinvests the rest. Endowment income is Harvard’s largest source of revenue. It’s a little complicated, of course: Harvard’s “endowment” isn’t a fund but some 14,000 individual funds, most of which are restricted to certain uses in certain programs. But it is a big pile of money, and there’s a great big stream of revenue from tuition and other sources, too.
It is not that Harvard isn’t going to miss the $2.2 billion in grants and contracts the Trump administration has frozen on account of … pretexts for its pique and resentment and vindictiveness. But Harvard can adapt. So can Yale University ($41 billion) Stanford University ($36 billion), Princeton University ($33 billion), and the University of Pennsylvania ($21 billion), etc.
Hillsdale does things a little differently. It has a respectable endowment, too, right around $1 billion. Tuition represents a relatively small share of its revenue; instead, the school has developed real proficiency at fund-raising and generating its own income over the years. Hillsdale has a reputation for conservatism, but conservatism is a slippery thing: Hillsdale was open to black and female students from its founding in 1844 (doing so was part of the point of its founding as a Christian college) whereas Harvard didn’t graduate its first African Americans until a generation later and didn’t admit female undergraduates until the 1970s. I taught a seminar at Hillsdale a few years back, and I was surprised (and pleased) to learn that while there were a lot more young people walking around with pictures of Margaret Thatcher there than at the typical campus, that was a minority enthusiasm, while most of the students were there to learn history and read philosophy and to be, in a word, educated.
What Hillsdale’s independence from government funding has enabled is not conservatism or sectarianism but independence. Does that sound good to anybody else right now? And by anybody, I mean anybody sitting in a university’s president’s office.
There’s an old story about two brothers, one an alcoholic and the other a teetotaler. The alcoholic explains himself: “My father was a drunk. My grandfather was a drunk. All my uncles were drunks. What choice did I have?” And the teetotaler explains himself: “My father was a drunk. My grandfather was a drunk. All my uncles were drunks. What choice did I have?” Hillsdale is a teetotaler when it comes to government money, but other institutions may be getting the message that it is time to sober up.
They should take advantage of the moment.
It is easy to find a lot of inane, insane, or counterproductive stuff being done with public money at universities. (There’s a whole weird little galaxy of right-wing media that employs telegenic 22-year-olds to do almost nothing else.) On the other hand, university-based (and most often government-supported) work in “basic science”—pure research into the fundamental questions—is an excellent use of the modest public resources involved. And, yes, the resources are modest: A typical year’s worth of federal support of basic science amounts to about 11 days of Social Security spending.
A smart political hustler, understanding that the road from pure research to commercialization is not as long and winding today as it was a generation ago, might propose some modest entitlement reform, using most of the savings for deficit-reduction but kicking in enough to, say, triple federal funding for basic science, which could have real benefits for the areas in which the United States actually excels, which isn’t 20th-century manufacturing but cutting-edge information technology, pharmaceuticals and life sciences, other medical technologies, aerospace, robotics, energy, agriculture, etc. The graduate students and captains of industry you’d bring into your camp may not be a huge voting bloc, but Americans have, historically, enjoyed living in the country that keeps inventing the future, and we had a pretty good run of it from the Manhattan Project through the birth of the Internet.
Unfortunately, our current generation of political hustlers is peopled by those who aren’t even smart enough to see the most obvious kinds of opportunity.
There is much to be said for government support of university research, as the Pentagon and NASA et al. have known for a long time. The case against the universities is the same as the case against other elite institutions: They are too fat and lazy, too smug and self-satisfied, too insulated from market pressures and democratic accountability, too keen on niche enthusiasms and voguish ideological jihads—too far removed from the people they are supposed to serve and the people who pay the taxes that support so much of their work. That case often is overstated, but it does not come out of nowhere, and it is not entirely without merit.
Harvard has an opportunity to set an example, to refocus itself on its most worthwhile work and to do a little pruning of the unfruitful and the meretricious. And maybe make a little bit of a show out of it—and drive home the point. Other universities—the ones that do not have Harvard’s resources—would benefit from Harvard’s taking the lead. Government money is always going to come with political strings, but there are better and worse ways to play the politics, and Harvard has enough in its rainy-day funds to enjoy some flexibility: Thanks to its endowment, Harvard doesn’t have to kowtow to this administration or to the next one. But the moment does call for action: This is one of those cases where good policy is good politics: Husbanding university resources more prudently would be a better practice and would also assuage some of the populist irritation that has made a political target of higher education.
Sure, there will be some howls down at the sundry grievance-studies departments, but what’s the point of having “f—k-you” money if you never say the words and do the thing?
