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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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Harvard’s endowment is huge, and everyone could stop donating right now and Harvard wouldn’t notice. If Griffin or Ackman or whatever Twitter busybody billionaire thinks Harvard cares about them, or even notices who they are, they are seriously high on their own supply.

There’s also a less public issue where a lot of these donations are shadily (though not-publicly) invested via the endowment management company into the donors’ PE or VC or hedge funds at exorbitant fees (for a hint of this, check out the composition of Stanford’s board) so their pulling out isn’t costless from the donor’s perspective.

i got the sense that majority of endowment growth is through investments, like how David Swensen ran the Yale endowment, or how much money Stanford makes from VC funds.

This is also true of public pensions, like CALPERS, or Ontario teachers union, or any of these big money funds that need to grow (though VC usually is not like, 50% of their investments).

Coupled with how well Griffin's Citadel grows the pile, it makes sense to invest in them (if harvard does invest in citadel funds - im not sure)

If it’s already big then yes most of the growth is through growth of the investments. Despite what they say, and despite a lot of smoothing and fudging, VC/PE/hedge funds make money when equity markets go up and lose money when equity markets go down, so investing into that stuff isn’t really a secret sauce.

On the other hand, university endowments are a huge slice of business for these funds, so Harvard & similar pulling out of Pershing Square is way way worse for Pershing Square than Bill Ackman taking his (relatively small) ball and going home is bad for Harvard.

Harvard isn’t prestigious if it’s just an activist shop. Those rich people checks don’t just back Harvard’s bankroll. They are prestigious because people like Zuck went to Harvard, created a giant company from scratch, and then provides well paid jobs to Harvard grads. I’m very skeptical that activist Harvard grads are going to be the hiring managers and law firm partners doling out big checks to recent grads.

I don’t know the end game here but if all the Milton Friedman (and the 30-35% of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews) types quit going to Harvard and started going to Eastern Kentucky State then I am fairly certain in a generation Eastern Kentucky State would be considered a top 3-5 global university.

I don’t know the end game here but if all the Milton Friedman (and the 30-35% of Nobel Prize winners who are Jews) types quit going to Harvard and started going to Eastern Kentucky State then I am fairly certain in a generation Eastern Kentucky State would be considered a top 3-5 global university.

It'll never happen, though. Prestige begets prestige, and there hasn't been a new prestigious university created since Stanford. You can't compete with Harvard unless you destroy it first, and it's always going to look easier to take it back over.

Stanford wasn't internationally prestigious until what, 1960s or 70s? It wasn't obviously a competitor to the Ivies until DoD investments and silicon valley started taking shape in that time, no?

Nobel Prized and billionaire graduates especially mostly self made billionaires begets prestige. Jews are very good at both of those things.

If the Jews got some stones and boycotted the Ivy League and came up with an approved set of institutions the Ivy League would be toast in a generation.

there hasn't been a new prestigious university created since Stanford

CMU was founded 15 years later and is very prestigious in the CS world. As AI becomes more important its profile should rise even higher

That's not the kind of prestige they're talking about. No one is going to become president / a senator / congressman / have any real decision power, really, because they got a tech degree.

We've had presidents from institutions as illustrious as Texas State, UMich, U of Delaware, UNC chapel hill, and Georgia southwestern state. I haven't checked congresspeople but I presume there's even more dubious institutions there. The supreme Court is much more exclusive to prestigious institutions, although there are still some notable recent exceptions (Barrett, who attended a law school ranked 27th).

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