Harvard's War With Trump Forces Question of How Endowments Should Be Spent

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

68% : Like Warren Buffett, Mr. Swensen became a guru in the field, with acolytes spread out across the academic ecosystem swelling wealth in elite higher education.
63% : Two years ago, Zohran Mamdani, a progressive New York State assemblyman now running for mayor, introduced failed legislation to end more than $321 million in annual property tax exemption for New York University and Columbia and divert that money to the city's troubled public university system.
55% : If you suggest to academic bureaucrats that there must be a way for huge endowments to cover prospective cuts in government funding -- and you are not Larry Summers -- they will look at you as if you were a child wondering why it is unwise to leave raw eggs out in the sun.
51% : There are proposals from Republicans in Congress to increase the tax on large endowments, potentially to 14 percent, much higher than the 1.4 percent put in place eight years ago.
50% : This emerged as a mantra embedded in the assumption that universities are "immortal." Running the Ford Foundation in the late 1960s, McGeorge Bundy, a former presidential adviser, had already been worrying about the costs of higher education.
50% : Tuition, as high as it is, does not cover the cost of an education at most places; about a quarter of the money, the research showed, went to academic programs and maintaining facilities.
46% : Foundations as well as cultural and religious institutions are required by law to spend a 5 percent minimum; colleges and universities are not but do so because they think it is sound policy.
20% : The Trump administration's war against higher education for what it insists is a dangerous culture of intellectual inflexibility has forced a debate about capital as central now as the vast underlying disagreements over values.

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