One of the closed centers was dedicated to the environment, another to voter engagement. The third, which many faculty members describe as the real target, was the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity, run by Gene Nichol, a law professor and a vituperative critic of the Republican legislature. In one of a series of opinion pieces criticizing spending cuts, published in Raleigh’s News & Observer, he had referred to the legislature’s “unforgivable war on poor people.” Nichol has no doubt that the closing of the center was intended as punishment. On several occasions, “my dean was compelled to call me into his office and relate threats received from Republican leaders of the General Assembly if I didn’t stop writing articles for the News & Observer,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The center would be closed, or I’d be fired.”
.. An untenured member of the humanities faculty, who requested anonymity, wrote in an e-mail, “I am constantly aware of the state’s charged political atmosphere and the scrutiny of the university’s political enemies. I know there are certain subjects I simply cannot write about in a public forum and topics I must handle gingerly in my teaching.” Other faculty members spoke of receiving phone calls from legislators and requests to review syllabi from conservative advocacy groups. Donald Raleigh, a history professor, said that one of those groups, the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, requested the syllabus for his course “Gorbachev, the Collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Rise of the New Russia.” The syllabus was freely available online, but the Pope Center wrote to the university legal office to request it under the state’s open-records law.
.. On the one hand, Pope Center researchers say that higher education should be regarded as an economic good like any other, and that low tuition rates “subsidize” it and distort the market.
.. The other reformist front is a call to revive the Great Books model of humanities education: literature and philosophy as a source of eternal truths, dating back to Plato, passing through John Locke, and perfected by Ayn Rand and the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek.
.. If you think the political system is corrupt, what you’re really saying is the American people are corrupt. And if you’re saying the American people are corrupt, then what you have to do of course is change American culture. And the way you change culture is through ideas…
.. Some version of a cost-benefit calculus for learning is inevitable in a precarious economy with expensive, debt-funded education. But to reconceive of public universities as the meeting place of two markets—students investing in their own “human capital” and private investors looking to influence curricula—is another thing altogether.
.. A successful humanities education makes the obvious questionable and shows that the present is neither eternal nor inevitable. These are not goals designed to pass market tests or bend to the ideologies of wealthy donors.
How much gold is there in the world?
Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest investors, says the total amount of gold in the world – the gold above ground, that is – could fit into a cube with sides of just 20m (67ft).
But is that all there is? And if so, how do we know?
A figure that is widely used by investors comes from Thomson Reuters GFMS, which produces an annual gold survey.
Their latest figure for all the gold in the world is 171,300 tonnes – which is almost exactly the same as the amount in our super-villain’s imaginary cube.
Fund-raising for Bard College
Bard has always educated the kind of student that tends not to go to Wall Street. They haven’t made buckets of money.” Unlike the best-endowed liberal-arts colleges, such as Amherst, Williams, and Swarthmore, Bard has done little to foster links to the business community. On campus, this has its positive side: the atmosphere is intellectually idealistic and anything but pre-professional. But, unsurprisingly, an excess of critical-theory-reading photography majors doesn’t make for a promising donor pool.
.. Botstein has written that “it is an embarrassment that so much time, effort, emotion, and money are expended on gladiatorial exhibitions.” But, for better or worse, such activities are at the heart of fund-raising. Noah Drezner, an associate professor of higher education at Teachers College, Columbia University, told me, “Studies have shown that former student athletes, even just those who participated in organized college sports, are more likely to give, and give at higher rates.”
.. Instead of appealing to alumni, Botstein’s chief tactic has been to court a few exceptionally wealthy donors. “We’re in the business of looking for large investors,” he told me. “Basically, the people who created the college are Leon Levy, Dick Fisher, and George Soros.”
.. The proliferation of ancillary programs at Bard reflects a fundamental dynamic in today’s nonprofit world. It’s far easier to interest big donors in funding eye-catching initiatives than in funding unglamorous core activities. (At colleges, the latter usually end up being supported by incremental gifts from alumni, parents, and friends.) Many people I spoke to said that Botstein’s great strength as a fund-raiser is that he thinks like a donor.
1896: McKinley raised 26 times William Jennings Bryan
In 1896, when corporations could give directly to political candidates, pro-corporate Republican presidential candidate William McKinley raised $16 million to populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s $600,000.
.. But the press has an obligation to follow power, to explain how our political system actually works, not to hew to a civics-class fantasy that less and less resembles reality.