Who Owns the University?

American Greatness ^ | 26 Mar, 2023 | Victor Davis Hanson

[MtnClimber]

The megalomania of the current crop of students, faculty, and administrators at our radical universities blinds them to the claims of their generations of benefactors.

The most recent shout-down debacle at Stanford’s law school, one of many such recent sordid episodes, prompts the question: “Who owns our universities?”

The law students who are in residence for three years apparently assume they embody the university. And so, they believe they represent and speak for a score of diverse Stanford interests when they shout down federal Judge Kyle Duncan, as if he were an intruder into their own woke private domain.

After all, Stanford, like most of the Ivy League universities, is a private institution. Are then its board of trustees, its faculty, its students, and its administration de facto overseers and owners?

Not really.

In the case of public institutions of higher learning, there is no controversy: The people own the university and, through their elected representatives, pay for and approve its entire budget. Again, through their selected regents and overseers, the taxpayers adjudicate the laws of these universities.

But private universities, while different, are not really so different.

Take again Stanford as a typical example. It receives about $1.5 billion per year in federal taxpayer grants alone to its various faculty, labs, research centers, and programs.

Its annual budget exceeds $8 billion. If Stanford accepts such huge federal and state direct largess, do the taxpayers who provide it have some say about how and under what conditions their recipients use their money?

Second, the university also has accumulated a $36 billion endowment. At normal annual investment returns, such an enormous fund may earn well over $2 billion a year. That income is almost all tax-free, based on the principle that Stanford is a nonprofit, apolitical institution.

But is it?

[Bon of Babble]

These universities that allow this - students shouting down and threatening speakers they don't like - tearing statues down of founders (such as at Rice) - or mandating name changes (such as at UC Hastings School of Law) - should be held to account.

The Hastings family is fighting back after the name change:

As of last October, six descendants of S. C. Hastings are suing to undo the name change... or else return to them the $100,000 in gold that Hastings provided to found the school, which with interest is now reckoned to be worth $1.7 billion

Included in the lawsuit is what amounts to a claim of posthumous libel on the benefactor. The suit claims the name change, with the ”genocide” accusations, also defames Hastings’ descendants and even the school’s law graduates.

(T)here is no known evidence that S.C. Hastings desired, requested, or knowingly encouraged any atrocities against Native Americans,” the suit asserted, and neither Hastings nor his descendants have had “any opportunity for a judicial trial as to these horrific allegations,” the suit said. It said the state’s subsequent action “heaps scorn and punishment upon S.C. Hastings, his descendants, and indeed, by association, upon all of the tens of thousands of Hastings law graduates living and deceased.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-06/uc-hastings-college-of-the-law-name-change

Good for them. Hope donations dry up as well - my university will never get another penny from me after they went "woke."

[Ford4000]

Tax-exempt status needs to be limited to churches and legitimate charities. That is a tax “increase” I would support.

[minnesota_bound]

What do they do with the $36 billion endowment money?
Same question for Harvard and Yale etc.