no comments on expose of harvard financial troubles?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
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<p>The Vanity Fair article by Nina Monk is a good read:</p>

<p>Nina</a> Munk on Hard Times at Harvard | vanityfair.com</p>

<p>My faves:</p>

<pre><code> "Students feel betrayed. “Why haven’t the faculty been asked to sacrifice at all?” reads one typical comment posted on the Crimson’s Web site. “The lowest paid professors make over 150k+, and yet they have the nerve to tell students to suck it all up.”

Harvard’s biggest operating expense is salaries and benefits, which eat up almost half the operating budget. In the past year alone, that single expense jumped 7.5 percent. Today, on average, a full professor at Harvard earns $192,600, before benefits; that’s more than he or she would make at any other school in the nation.

“This story is about leadership. It isn’t about money.” He may be right. At some point in the last five years, the men and women who run Harvard convinced themselves that the endowment would grow at double-digit rates forever. If Harvard were a publicly traded company, those people would have been fired by now.

"If Harvard were a serious business facing a liquidity crisis, it would have done something drastic by now: fired senior employees, closed departments, sold off real estate. But Harvard, like most other leading universities, is stubborn and inflexible.

"Is Harvard desperate now? One clue is this: last December, the university sold $2.5 billion worth of bonds, increasing its total debt to just over $6 billion. Servicing that debt alone will cost Harvard an average of $517 million a year through 2038, according to Standard & Poor’s."
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<p>IT'S TIME FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA, THE CONGRESS AND THE US TREASURY TO REPLACE MANAGEMENT? Harvard is more important to the economy than GM and appears to have been just as badly managed. ROLF.</p>

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<p>The people who need to be down-sized are the administration. We have 10x the number of Deans that we need. I’m not sure if that article is really suggesting that Professors be fired, I’m too lazy to read it. But if so, has the writer never heard of tenure?</p>

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<p>“We hired faculty faster than we really should have We put up buildings based on debt financings—not fund-raising. And we decided the right thing to do was this financial-aid package, even though, again, we didn’t have new finances behind it to actually do it.”</p>

<p>Forcing grantless professors to retire, “recalibrating” some fancy programs (unless extramurally supported) and picking undergraduate candidates (otherwise academically equal) with means to pay are ways to go. Since faculty salaries have been frozen, the next viable thing to do is to raise the tuition and fees for students. Most of the non-tenure faculties in Medical School live on soft money, I don’t see why FAS wouldn’t do some sacrifice.</p>