@Roger_Dooley Did you want to provide examples of these administration “demand-du-jour decisions” or spineless giving in to protesters?
Because there really aren’t any in the Times article in the OP.
I’m just going to assume that you missed my post about UC students protesting in the 1920s about prom tickets. Hundreds of students were on the brink of riots.
But yeah, let’s continue to pretend that older generations were these worldly, non-impulsive, non-petty people.
Can you let us know if these protestors of the past also demanded to be paid to protest and to be excused from the classes and tests for a few days after protests?
Can you let us know when you’ve settled on a lasting position for your goalposts?
My goalposts are firmly in place. I just want to know if today’s protests are really no different from what was happening in the past.
You are more than welcome to dive in that deeply. I don’t research this specifically- I just pull out the headlines when I see them and find them amusing.
But considering that those demanding to be paid are an extreme minority even within the extreme minority of protests, I’d guess that no, they likely weren’t happening (at least in my era).
Then again, in my era, only the rich (generally white males but occasionally white females as well) went to college and college was virtually free. So, you know, apples to oranges.
Alumni giving reduced because of activism – at REED? No Way! If anything it would increase if there increased activism. My own giving increased almost every year until it reached a nice round 4-digit number, after which it crawled upward.
They are different sometimes, in some ways, and similar other times, in some ways.
How philosophical.
“Maybe it’s the previously discussed “customer orientation” that is now part of so many schools’ modus operandi. If the customers are demanding something, we’ve got to keep them happy, right?”
All institutions that stay alive follow the money. That includes churches, schools, everybody. Students are paying a lot more than they used to, but schools are raising a lot more from alumni, too. I don’t have any figures for how that funding ratio has changed over time, but you can bet that the schools know and they’re taking it into account.
Not every baby boomer college student was against the Vietnam War, just sayin’.
Good point - it is pretty incredible that Princeton can raise that kind of money despite being so small and having no business, law, or medical school.
Also, maybe they have great portfolio management of the endowment?
how much do alumni actually contribute to the annual fund raising haul for a university?
Stanford has one of the worst alumni giving rates… and yet is year in and year out the top fund raising university in the US… despite not even being in a fund raising capital campaign (as is Harvard and USC).
so not sure alumni giving really makes a big difference and ascribing any noted decrease to activism seems like a stretch. maybe it’s school specific but activism is found on every university campus.
top fund raising universities 2015
- Stanford University ($1.63 billion)
- Harvard University ($1.05 billion)
- University of Southern California ($653.03 million)
- University of California-San Francisco ($608.58 million)
- Cornell University ($590.64 million)
- Johns Hopkins University ($582.68 million)
- Columbia University ($552.68 million)
- Princeton University ($549.84 million)
- Northwestern University ($536.83 million)
- University of Pennsylvania ($517.20 million)
- University of California-Los Angeles ($473.21)
“not sure alumni giving really makes a big difference”
It does, especially for the LACs. Looking at the richest institutions in the country is misleading. People give to Harvard and Stanford because they want the cachet of associating their foundation or business with the institution. So Stanford/Harvard have all kinds of funding streams from multiple sources. That’s a bizarre outlier. No one gives money to Albion College unless they went to Albion.
Post #75 is like pointing to the ten richest retirees in America to suggest that Social Security payments aren’t a big factor in household budgets. You’re right, Sheldon Adelson and Sumner Redstone aren’t living off their SS. But millions of people can only make ends meet because of those payments.
Look at Sweet Briar. They were done, and now they’re not done, because of changes in alumni giving.
People keep on referring to this generation and don’t seem to realize that the current college students are the younger members of the millennial generation. The older Millennials graduated college a decade ago. You never heard of all this political correctness in 2006-07. There is a large difference between people born in the mid 1980s and mid-1990s.
Yeah… ok.
In the 2000s, students agitated to get universities out of sweatshop countries. This was the time of the organic, free trade, etc protests.
In the UK, this is when students were revolting against tuition increases.
Every single generation does the exact same thing. You just hear about it on a much larger scale now because of 24/7 news and internet at most people’s fingertips at all times.
“You never heard of all this political correctness in 2006-07.”
The show “Politically Incorrect” debuted in 1993, so the idea was ingrained enough at that point to have inspired backlash.
And the movie PCU came out in 1994! I graduated college in 1991 and a comic strip in the college paper had a character called PC Man. So it was definitely around.
It does seem to ebb and flow though.
Like what?
They’re about 10 years older.
(Sorry, but you walked right into that one 
)