My Spring edition of the Harvard alumni magazine just arrived. It was clearly written before Trump’s assault on the school had reached its current zenith, but the magazine’s spinning away of Harvard’s various ethical transgressions was still in evidence, as it always is.
I found one feature more head-exploding than the rest. An alum of recent vintage mocked a previous issue essay warning that Harvard’s “financial foundations” were “at risk” of being “shattered” because of Trump’s barbarians in Washington breaching the metaphorical gates. Pointing to his alma mater’s approximately 53 billion dollar endowment, the contrarian grad wrote, “Given the general Harvard ethos that taxing the rich is a virtue, you would think that taxing the richest—-Harvard—would be embraced, not cause for alarm. What hypocrisy.”
The editor tit-tutted that the writer was mistaken, because Harvard’s endowment per student was less than some other institutions, such as Princeton. Oh. What a neat way to minimize the size of an massive endowment! Amusingly, another letter in the same issue suggested that Harvard use that device, endowment dollars per student, to combat attacks, stating the endowment as “X dollars per student” rather than cumulatively.
Obviously, the staff adopted the suggestion immediately.
Ethics Alarms 