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  • Help Harvard Spend Its Endowment: Part Two

    By ud September 3, 2007 12:52 pm

    UD has already proposed that Harvard relieve itself of the guilty burden of a forty billion dollar endowment by giving a ten million dollar grant to a small college in Florida - Florida Southern College - to help renovate its important collection of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

    A newspaper reporter in Florida picked up on her IHE post and asked other schools in the vicinity how they would help Harvard spend its endowment, and they provided many worthy ideas. Here's another one:

    IHE wrote last year about the increasingly popular idea of establishing a new college in the United States -- a public service academy. Tuition would be free (paid for by the government), the curriculum would feature the traditional liberal arts plus a focus on democratic theory and civic activism, and students would spend five years after graduation in the public or non-profit sector. Both Biden and Clinton among presidential candidates support the school.

    Harvard can help the school's chances of congressional approval by pledging $100 million in support for infrastructure as the thing begins to be built.

    UD is about to bother her friend Bill Galston, who's involved in the project. She is about to see whether he's willing to be interviewed about it. Ne quittez pas.

    ...Well, I've fussed so long with this post that I've heard back from Bill, who says Sure. Anytime. So I'll prepare a list of questions for him and run the interview in a bit.

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Comments on Help Harvard Spend Its Endowment: Part Two

  • Posted by R.J. O'Hara at The Collegiate Way on September 3, 2007 at 6:25pm EDT

  • As someone who specializes in one particular species of college-founding, I think the idea of a public service academy is grand. Don't jump too quickly to put it in Washington -- that might make it into a center only for politicos, and there's far more to public service than inside-the-beltway life. How about in an old mill-town in Maine with lots of real estate and with environmental and economic leadership opportunities available, or similarly up on the Great Lakes; or perhaps create several smaller units in different places, all sharing the same curriculum, so students could spent part of their time on one of the alternate campuses? (As St. John's does with campuses in Maryland and New Mexico.) A strong liberal arts program should be the core of the formal curriculum -- that's the best education for the citizens of a free society.

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