With a 53 billion endowment, why are they getting any funding?
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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I've seen this line of reasoning spouted by a bunch of MAGAts.
Because yes, on the face of it should an institution with $53 billion in the bank be getting billions in taxpayer money.
BUT ... the Trump administration didn't say "we're going to end government funding to colleges and universities and we'd like to have a public debate on that."
They didn't even say "we don't think rich and powerful colleges like Harvard shouldn't be getting billions in taxpayer money so we're ending that giveaway."
No. They went the bully route and said "if Harvard doesn't follow OUR ideology and our perverse way of looking at the world, then we're going to try and hurt them."
That is tyranny. That is oppression. That is blackmail.
And anybody who isn't in a political cult can see that.
Just like how anyone not in a cult can ask "Hey why DO they get $2b in the first place, how much is going to the executives, and who else is getting this?"
Or
"Maybe our system is just fundamentally broken"
Because America has been a corporate dictatorship masquerading as "democracy" for generations.
It's fd up
Savings for a rainy day which empirically has occurred.
Also capitalism.
Why in the flying fuck are my tax dollars going to fuckin harvard?!?!
Edit: I admit I 100% did not think about research grants and I also admit I am forever skeptical of any university's budget and financing regardless if they're public or private. Nothing about higher education operating costs adds up to me.
They're grants. Universities are one of the foremost research institutions in the world. Not granting them additional research funds would basically mean we're relying on donations or private research, which would be driven by profit potential instead of overall benefit to mankind.
Remember how after SARS universities started researching novel vaccine creation methods and that research lead to an extremely rapid development and response to COVID when more traditional vaccines would have taken several more years. But none of that was obviously profitable so there were no companies interested in doing that kind of research?
You know how nMRI and CRT machines are really neat but they didn't exist because we didn't understand physics enough to use giant spinning magnets and radioactive isotopes to see inside people without cutting them open. And how there wasn't a commercial use for those kind of low energy particles so existing reactors were just disposing of them as waste?
That kind of stuff.
Because the government wants (should want, its debatable rn) people to become educated and contribute to society, so they subsidize education. A lot of this money goes to research and scholarships, and while it's questionable why Harvard needs billions from the government when they already charge out the ass, it makes sense that the government (and in theory, the taxpayers too) want more people to get good education to help the country we all live in do better. This applies for a lot of colleges and universities, not just Harvard.