Crain’s Chicago Business published a fascinating, head-scratching and troubling opinion piece recently by two professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University critical of the “wealth hoarding” of large private research institutions.
They note: “In the past few weeks, as faculty at Chicago State University reviewed their pink slips and those at Northeastern Illinois University learned about mandatory furloughs amounting to 20 percent pay cuts, the University of Chicago announced a $35 million gift from the founder of an investment firm to establish a ‘new think tank to research urban issues.’” It received another $10 million from the Pritzker family to fund ‘Urban Labs’ that will support research addressing the ‘big challenges cities face.’”
These professors then recite a litany of the problems that their institutions confront. They comment: “We teach at institutions of higher education experiencing endless belt-tightening and wage losses, and which, like most public colleges and universities, have no big donors on the horizon.” They further cite the impasse over the state’s budget, reporting: “Even if a budget passes, the governor has proposed a 31 percent cut to public higher education.”
They exclude flagship public institutions like the University of Illinois whose leaders “have some financial reserves to help them weather this budget impasse. But the public universities in Illinois that serve the greatest number of working poor and first-generation college-goers do not.” Having set the context, the professors argue: “Offering mass amounts of private wealth to already hugely wealthy private institutions is scandalous.”
Their solution is simple: nationalize the endowments of wealthy private colleges and universities in America.
It’s hard to even know where to start. The responses to the Crain’s article ran the full gamut from those supporting massive wealth redistribution to practical suggestions on how to govern cash-strapped public universities, with a good deal of name-calling back and forth as the comments posted online.
Let’s separate out what doesn’t matter. We should begin by assuming that the work of these professors was a good faith effort to stimulate dialogue with a fresh approach.
