Winter ball

Scheduling

A year is 365 days, at least. A semester at Princeton is 102 days from the opening of classes to the end of exams. That leaves 161 days, in a two semester year. The ineluctable conclusion is that Princeton should have a three-semester year. I don’t mean a “trimester”. I mean that the full-year calendar should be divided into three semesters; the class sizes should be increased by 50%, and each student should attend two of the three semesters each year. To this proposal Princeton certainly will have its usual reaction: “We’ve been doing it the other way for 200 years, so it can’t be changed.” But it can be. I’ve done the math, once again. Using the 2008-2009 school year calendar, summer semester begins June 5 and ends September 26; fall semester begins September 29 and ends January 28; spring semester begins February 2 and ends May 25. Reunions begin May 28, and graduation ends it all on June 2. There are three reasons to do this: one financial, one eleemosynary, and the last is a bonus so sweet that it reassures me. The financial reason is obvious. If the number of new donors produced every year is increased by 50%, tuition will be more indefensible than ever. Eleemosynarily, the world’s best undergraduate education will be available to an additional 2,000 kids, every year, without further destruction of the campus’ disappearing green places. And the bonus? Baseball will be played in the summer. If anything is less defensible than tuition at Princeton, it has to be playing baseball in March and April in places like Hanover and Ithaca, or even Princeton.

Stealing

My signals

Harvard may not be able to do arithmetic (see “Too good to wait”, post January 16, 2009), but they can read. In my last post I recommended that Princeton “close Princo”, the unit that manages Princeton’s endowment, for reasons too obvious to repeat. I repeat them for our reading-challenged administration: (1) Princo took pointless investment risks; (2) Princo’s incentive structure is counterproductive, and (3) Princo’s employees are immensely overpaid. Picking off these signs, Harvard announced on Friday (AP) that they are going to fire 50 employees from the company that manages their endowment. I don’t know how many employees Princo has, but I hope that when we fire 50 of them we will be “closing” the franchise. If Princo has more than 50 employees, I have a universal sign for them—one that anyone could pick off.