antoine-roquentin:

In 2015, a New York Times op-ed acidly observed that Yale University had spent $480 million that year on fees for hedge fund managers to grow the university’s already massive endowment—while spending just $170 million on tuition assistance and fellowships for its students….

In addition to Yale, whose endowment was a whopping $25.4 billion in 2016, the holders of these outsized endowments include Harvard ($34.5 billion), Stanford ($22.4 billion), Princeton ($22.2 billion), and MIT ($13.2 billion), as well as top-tier state schools such as the University of Michigan ($9.7 billion) and the University of Virginia ($5.9 billion). In 2016, the fifty wealthiest universities in the country owned $331 billion in endowment wealth—a figure equal to roughly triple the size of California’s state budget last year and ten times that of Pennsylvania.

Henry did it, Japan did it
Even Jacobins in France did it
Let’s do it! Let’s suppress the monasteries!