Don't look back

They're gaining on you

“Sometimes I sits and thinks. Sometimes I just sits.”—Satchel Paige. In 1995 there was a day when I was both sitting and thinking. I wrote an open letter to Princetonians, in which I said that we had a “runaway endowment”. By “runaway” I meant that the endowment was growing faster than the legitimate educational needs that it was created to serve. My letter urged the university to reduce student charges, suspend solicitation of donations, and make public disclosure of endowment information. In the eleven-plus years that have followed my first letter I have continued to heckle the university about this subject, from the cheap seats in the last row. Today I saw in the newspaper that two U.S. senators (Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana, and Chuck Grassley, Republican from Iowa) have written a letter from the Senate Committee on Finance to the IRS asking for scrutiny of endowment abuses for which Princeton is the un-named, but well-recognized, poster child. This of course is a brush-back pitch far closer to the chin than my first post in this blog (see 2-27-06). “Don’t look back, somebody may be gaining on you.”—also Satchel Paige. So now it’s becoming obvious; elimination of tuition no longer is just the honorable thing to do, it’s a matter of self-defense.