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Harvard saying they wouldn't comply with Trump and fight it in court was great.
If they really wanted to do "The Right Thing", they have the billions to keep these projects funded for several years while they fight. But I guess that's too much to ask.
If they really wanted to do "The Right Thing", they have the billions to keep these projects funded for several years while they fight.
No, they don't. Where do you think they could just magic up money?
Edit:
"They have an endowment!"
What do you people think an endowment is? It's not a rainy day slush fund. It's thousands of individual funds that are invested which Harvard, and other schools, use to generate income. But it's the investment that generates income. If they spend down the endowment then it's gone and no more money for the future.
Think of it like a savings account where you live off the interest generated. If you spend the savings, no more interest.
Also - like 80% of that money must be spent in certain schools, types of research, supporting certain students, etc. They can't legally use it for anything else.
The donations that people have made over the years, giving them the largest endowment in world history?
It’s kinda like asking “how is Elon Musk going to pay for that?” I don’t know, how about with some of his money.
Harvard is known for having one of the most enormous endowments of any college anywhere.
Same to you - what do you think an endowment is?
You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.
None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do, because many of the affected researchers are going to be losing work in progress that may have to be replicated if they are ever rehired, and some portion of those laid off are going to move on to other things, impacting Harvard’s research capacity and their reputation as a desirable, high-status employer in the sciences. One would have hoped that they picked this fight with the intention of winning it, and failing to tap the endowment as bridge funding while the legal challenges play out risks making it something of a Pyrrhic victory.
They’re not doing research for Harvard, they’re doing science research for the public which was competitively assessed and awarded.
That’s how the US has chosen to fund science research for over 50 years. It was considered a public good and has easily been one of best public investments that we’ve made during the period.
America has been at the pinnacle of science, medicine and education largely through this partnership with Universities. trump and company are pissing that legacy away in an effort to destroy higher education in the US, which they believe to be an impediment to them instituting authoritarian rule.
They’re happy to loot the country and burn it to the ground so long as they can rule over the ashes.
You’re acting as if Harvard has no control over the way they utilize the endowment, and that’s just not true. Of course they want to manage it so that they are only drawing from a portion of the gains rather than actually spending it down. Of course some percentage of funds are earmarked for specific purposes like new buildings, endowed professorships, and the like.
"Some percentage" is a gross understatement:
"In addition, many donors also designate a specific purpose for which their fund can be spent. For Harvard, over 80 percent of endowed funds are subject to these restrictions. Contributions may be given in support of a specific School, program, or activity, and can only be used for those purposes. " (emphasis mine)
None of this means that Harvard cannot make the strategic decision to dip heavily into the endowment to maintain researchers’ livelihoods while their fight moves through the courts. Arguably it’s the fiscally-responsible thing to do
It would be financially ruinous to do so. That endowment spending would be gone. Just gone. You would get short-term payouts but you would fuck University funding for decades. And we're talking core funding which can't be paid back by the grants that would possibly be gotten in the future since those grants pay for the research. Even if they got the grants back that were cancelled it wouldn't be able to re-supply the endowment.
Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached. Harvard receives just shy of $500 million per year in NIH grants. They could fund the next four years of their scientific research completely out of pocket, and it would only cost 4% of the endowment, and leave the overwhelming majority of their unencumbered funds intact. Hell, 4% isn’t even half of the endowment’s growth rate last year — they could do this indefinitely to make a point and still grow the endowment. Is reducing their annual net profit by ~10% small beans? No, but it’s entirely doable and wouldn’t create any catastrophic impacts on the rest of the of the institution.
For what it’s worth I am in regular contact with another R1 institution that previously received significantly more federal research grant funding than Harvard, with an endowment a fraction of the size. To my knowledge they’ve frozen new hiring and are planning to tighten their belts in terms of capital expenditure, but they have not moved to cut researchers yet. This feels like a short-sighted move on Harvard’s part, and I rather suspect that they’re taking the opportunity to cut perceived chaff more than anything else.
Run the numbers. 20% of Harvard’s ~$53 billion endowment is more than $10 billion that they can spend, no strings attached.
Yes? But only once. What do they do next year when they need to fund the university?
Did you read past my first sentence? They can replace the entirety of the research grant funding they receive from the government out of pocket and it would barely even dent the rate of growth of the endowment. You think you’re making a clever point here and you’re just not.
Disagree. I doubt your janky math .So what conspiracy theory do you have for why they aren't?
Dude… my “janky math” is that 500,000,000 / 53,000,000,000 is ~0.01, or 1% versus the ~9.5% ROI they received on donations and investments last year. You can check that with a calculator app in about ten seconds if you doubt me, and my “conspiracy theory,” which you would have found in the post directly above if you bothered to actually read it, is that Harvard is making the shortsighted decision to hoard its cash and use the cuts as an excuse to cut perceived low-performing lab teams, rather than make a relatively minor outlay to keep everyone on, and make an implicit statement about the importance of research and the weakness of Trump’s hand here.
You didn't even know until this conversation that 80% of the endowment is untouchable. You know almost nothing of budgeting at harvard. And just expect me to accept numbers you throw out.
"For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, easy, and wrong" comes to mind.
I was hoping to avoid credentialiam, but… You assume much of what I do and don’t know. I grew up with a parent in higher education administration, and due to my own career I am regularly in communication with a range of R1 research universities, including two which I am currently preforming long-range lab space demand forecasts for. I have had a front-row seat to how the sausage gets made in higher education for the last three decades, and I am regularly talking to senior leadership at one of the top 5 schools in the US for medical research, specifically about these kinds of staffing issues and how the illegal impoundment of NIH and NSF grants are affecting them.
Am I intimately involved with the budgeting process at Harvard specifically? No, but then I’d wager you probably aren’t either, and it’s not that hard to look up stats about their endowment and do some basic math about them. You’re stuck on this one point that about 80% of is earmarked for specific uses, when their overall endowment is so enormous that that number is practically immaterial to the argument. (10% of it is specifically earmarked for the School of Medicine, by the way, which is where most of the lost grant money was concentrated.)
I am not proposing that there is some grand conspiracy at work to throw researchers out of Harvard. Rather, as the tone and tenor of the article linked above would suggest, Harvard's administration is laser-focused on the money, and is starting from the notion that line must always go up no matter what. I don’t doubt that the usual academic politics is preventing the broader university from thinking that it might be worthwhile to share the load to keep scientists working while Harvard fights this, and that’s a shame.
Posted to the wrong comment, whoops
The Harvard University endowment, valued at $53.2 billion as of June 30, 2024, is the largest academic endowment in the world
That’s not how it works though. They just can’t put that money to anything (same with other higher education). If the Gates Foundation provided them $1B for research of AI… it can only go to that. If they use it for something else, Harvard can get sued.
Let’s not forget that the endowment tax is going up to as much as 18% (or higher) soon… once that big dumb bill gets passed.
Who needs research when you don't have a future? - America
How do you get a future if you don't do research? - Academia
Europe welcomes scientists from a country that does not value science.
You should tell Germany to stop arresting and banning people who post anti-genocide stuff on social media
As does Canada.
reverse brain drain, all the scientist that left europe decades ago, is probalby going to reclaim some of it back.
Exactly the move you'd expect from the dumbest government in history... their strategy has the foresight of a bat with laryngitis
US dominance on pretty much anything is over
Well, Europe welcomes them, their talents and their research. And it's a stable place, which in any other circumstance would just be the bare minimum instead of an actual benefit.
Can't wait to move. Fuck this country.
Very excited to watch as the US lags behind in research because basically anyone with more intelligence than President Cheeto left for Canada, Europe, Australia or New Zealand.
America healthy again. If no research.
That's exactly what happened in 2020 isn't it? Trump wanted to stop Covid testing, because less testing meant fewer confirmed cases. Then thousands of people died every single day from uhh... something else.
phds, mds are usually the first to leave once a govt trainsition into a full fascist state, they know they are the first argets. then they will start persecuting POCS, and lgbtq+, and enemies, and then thier own loyalists,. it is a matter of time before US military tech falls behind, if they expel too many scientists from the aeronautics, weapons industry, via the Universities they source them from.
I'm leaving a university in the US that's not heavily reliant upon soft money (grants/donations), but we're still losing research support in various ways to this crazy administration. I start at a school in Europe in the fall. I guess I'll go teach and do engineering research there since the US isn't really interested in having academia exist.
congrats on getting out, is yours a PHD/MS, or a bs? i only have a bs in CMB,, since labs are notoriously hard on experience and research.
Very unfortunate to the people affected Canada should try to recruit these researchers
Already happening.
I'm not even done with medical school and I get targeted advertisements about how well British Columbia treats their doctors.
canada, and europe has good med school, its just the pay in us is better, and its difficult to be certified in the usa as a foreign doctor, unless your from one of the above countries.
already happening, doctors choose to stay in canada now, instead of a bougie position in ucla.
These guys know the cost of everything and the value of nothing
I assure you they do not know the cost of everything. Example: DOGE didn't look at cutting expenses in any of this most of expensive programs, like military spending and social security.
Next foot!
I said next foot!
Good