The Trump administration responded quickly to Harvard University’s defiance on Monday, freezing more than $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts after the university rejected demands that it change hiring, admissions and other policies.
Based on some basic searches (deep research, obviously), Harvard can run off of just its endowment for almost 10 years. Add in forthcoming donations and investment returns along with some mild cost-cutting, and it seems like an easy bet on Harvard to outlast Trump… hopefully they don’t cave.
Not to mention that they own huge swaths of extremely valuable land. They own like a third of Allston, MA alone. They could easily sell a chunk of that for tens of millions of dollars.
Tens of millions of dollars in a budget like Harvard’s barely funds anything. Billions of dollars in federal funded have been frozen.
I’m sure the current government administration can, too. What’s going to stop them from abusing civil forfeiture to do it… a sternly worded letter, maybe?
That’s what I was thinking: how can Trump mess with their endowment?
Devalue the American dollar.
Or just order some Nazi loyalist troops to take over thee campus and kill whom ever they choose.
So long as it’s an official act the Supreme Court says he can do anything he likes.
Harvard can run off of just its endowment for almost 10 years.
They can’t. It’s not just cash in a savings account. It’s hundreds of investments that have legal restrictions on the usage of the interest from those investments that regulate how it can be used.
Yea this is a bully technique. Scare people (colleges) to conform to your laws or else (“withhold funding”). That’ll work on colleges that are relying heavily on government funded assistance, but when mommy and daddy make over $20 million per year…yea they don’t give a shit. They pay to push people through as qualified, it’s why Donny was elected in the first place 😆
It may outlast the entire country. Considering it was founded 140 years before the U.S., that wouldn’t be entirely surprising.
