Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Dylan Matthews has an impassioned blast against soi-disant liberals at institutions of higher education (in his case, Harvard) who are totally OK with having an endowment of tens of billions of dollars, and then, when that endowment falls to slightly fewer tens of billions of dollars, supporting the administration’s firing of staff and maintenance workers to help make up the short fall.

The way Dylan tells it, the administration looks especially bad because they have not been forthcoming about their financial situation and how much these layoffs are necessary to fill up in any shortfall or gap, or if the layoffs are the best way to do this, as opposed to cutting elsewhere. But simple accountability and transparency questions are not that  interesting — the obligations of these institutions are.

Dylan claims that, on a personal level, “choosing to use the privilege of a Harvard education not to make the world a better place but to personally enrich oneself is despicable, and students who do so should be ashamed of themselves and their life choices,” and so one wouldn’t be suprised that he thinks that Harvard has institution-wide obligations to the not-as-well-off. But I think the questions are a little bit more thorny than that.

Sure, at the margins, Harvard (and every other private university sloshing around in money), should avoid screwing over the people that work for them, and, in general, devote a rather large amount of their money to egalitarian measures like not firing their workers and being very generous with financial aid. This seems rather simple, but I’d be weary of trying to get at any larger principle here.

Dylan deals with the basic response that colleges are just that, colleges, not “welfare agencies” and so they shouldn’t have special obligations to pay their workers more or to not fire them when they determine they should, by saying that the line of argument would lead to the elimination of financial aid for poorer students. But I think one could easily reductio ad absurdum both ways here. If we imagined Harvard to be an institution with a ton of money and an obligation to use that money in a just, fair and egalitarian fashion, the institution would look nothing like it was today. It would take all the money devoted towards, say, the humanities, and plough it into either basic research about development problems (malaria, international child poverty and so on) or into advocacy for, say, massively liberalized immigration laws. But of course, this would never happen. As a college, it exists under a rather more general set of obligations to, well, educate people, produce respected scholarly research, perform an essential public service and so on.

I’m not saying I disagree with anything Dylan says in his post. Once again, insomuch as Harvard or any other non-profit can afford to pay their workers as generously and employ them for as long as possible, they certainly should, I just don’t think making overarching claims about what their obligations are to society as a whole is all that useful and quickly leads you into some pretty tricky quandaries.

PS – Here’s a quick example. Let’s say that Institution of Higher Learning X has 100,000 lying around. The students want it to fund a concert. So, what’s I.H.L. X to do? Should they use that money for a concert (let’s assume that they have all the financial aid money and what not they need) or should they hire, say, three more maintenance workers that they could use but don’t need. Let’s say you think they should hire the workers. I would think that you would then argue that they should hire low-income people, or pay their current workers more until the marginal cost of doing so is so high as to imperil their basic functions as a University. I’m not saying this situation is totally analagous to anything Harvard or any other school is going through, but it illuminates how tricky these questions can be.