<
https://truthout.org/articles/harvard-has-become-a-tax-shelter-for-billionaires-as-public-education-languishes/>
"On April 11, 2023, Harvard University announced that the billionaire hedge
fund CEO Kenneth C. Griffin is donating $300 million to Harvard’s Faculty of
Arts and Sciences to fund research and scholarship. Griffin will reduce his
federal income tax bill by an estimated $110 million, according to the
Los
Angeles Times.
As a faculty member at the flagship Massachusetts public university, the
University of Massachusetts Amherst, I felt dismayed. With an estimated value
of over $50 billion, Harvard’s endowment is larger than the GDP of many of the
world’s countries, including Bolivia, Paraguay and Sierra Leone. Harvard is
richer than companies like General Motors, Coca-Cola and Intel. It doesn’t need
more money — but public universities desperately do.
At UMass Amherst, I’m privileged to teach some of the commonwealth’s best and
brightest undergraduates who come to campus because we claim to offer an
affordable, high-quality education at a fraction of the cost charged by private
institutions such as Harvard. But the conditions under which students and
faculty teach and learn at UMass are consistently poor. In Herter Hall, which
houses many of the university’s humanities departments, including my own
(History), the water fountains are routinely out of order and the insulation in
the ceilings is leaking. The elevators in many of the buildings are
consistently broken, causing huge obstacles for students (especially those with
disabilities) to pursue their studies. With an endowment of only $1.12 billion,
the UMass system has a mere fraction of the resources of Harvard — despite
enrolling more than double the number of students (73,979 versus Harvard’s
35,276).
Like many wealthy private universities, Harvard claims that “public service is
fundamental” to its institutional ethos. But the social benefits of these
private institutions are trivial in comparison to the civic good of public
higher education. As a 2020 Brookings Institution report found, “public
colleges contribute substantially more [than private institutions] to upward
[economic] mobility overall because they enroll many more students.” By
contrast, as scholars such as Davarian Baldwin have shown, the presence of
wealthy private institutions tend to make their communities worse off by
depriving municipalities of tax revenue, inflating the cost of housing, and
creating private police forces that militarize surrounding neighborhoods. The
victims include the working-class employees of these very universities, who
often cannot afford to live near their workplace and can be excluded from
assistance programs designed exclusively for faculty and high-level
administrators."
Via Whuffo, who wrote "This is a situation where taxation can readjust the
dynamic. Remove the tax advantages for donations to institutions with
endowments over $1 billion, and increase the tax advantages for funding public
education." and Christoph S.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
