Burning Money

Hi there, Larry.

You’re the guy who used to sign the money, right? Yeah, I thought so. That’s a good thing. See, we have a lot of money here—$19 billion in endowment, give or take the GDP of a couple of island nations here and there. Our last president, Neil “Take the Money and Run” Rudenstine, did a really good job of fundraising and was lucky enough to preside over a big bull market that gave us that 19 followed by nine zeroes.

Since we’ve got that cash, and since we’re not going to be making much money in the markets over the next few years, I think you’ll agree it’s time to focus on spending funds rather than raising them. Sure, Harvard’s been spending money recently—just look at our “Little Dig,” the Widener renovation, and you’ll see plenty of Benjamins flying out the windows. But why aren’t we spending money on undergraduates? No, Larry, Loker Commons absolutely does not count. Neil tried that argument too.

Now, I know you’ve already said you want to expand the Faculty, and I applaud you for that. But that means getting various departments to actually hire people. I don’t know—maybe you have experience herding cats and can pull it off. Still, it’s like Henry Kissinger ’50 said: “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

With that in mind, and with that $19 billion burning a hole in your pocket, here are some other ways you might spend Harvard’s money.

Buy the world a coursepack.

It’s been a while since you’ve hung around campus, Larry, so I’ll bet you didn’t know that our coursepacks cost a fortune nowadays. Some classes, including a lot of the biggest Cores, have coursepacks that cost $150 or more. This may not seem like a lot of money to a guy who bailed out the economies of Thailand, South Korea and Russia in the same year, but to us undergrads, that’s a lot of dough—over 15 hours of work on Dorm Crew. No coursepack is worth cleaning toilets for the better part of a day. You’d have 6,700 new best friends if you subsidized the cost of coursepacks (most of which is intellectual property anyways), or even better, if you ordered all faculty to use e-reserves, which store the texts online and allow us free retrieval. Free. That’s a nice word. Say it with me, Larry: “Free coursepacks.”

Simplify and expand financial aid.

Now, if I were you Larry, I’d do something about this quick. Princeton, as usual, has made us look downright stingy by doing away with loans entirely. Matching them tit-for-tat won’t do—Harvard, of all places, should never be caught playing catch-up for long. So I’d like to propose a new financial aid formula—you economists like formulas, don’t you?—to use for financial aid. If family income after taxes < $100,000 x # of children/family then tuition, room and board are free. Absolutely free. No loans, no mandatory work-study, no restrictions. Just plain free. It’s a nice word, Larry.

Bulldoze Radcliffe Yard.

Stop laughing, Larry—I’m not kidding. I think some people still work there, but I could be wrong. In any case, with Radcliffe now totally absent from the experience of most female undergrads, there’s no reason to house the Radcliffe Institute on such prime Cambridge real estate. For starters, the nonessential stuff—excluding Schlesinger Library, Agassiz Theater and whatnot—should be moved somewhere less expensive. I hear there’s space next to the Harvard Book Depository, out in the Berkshires. There’s some lovely views out there, and good skiing.

After you bulldoze the place, you should build a new residential house on that land. I propose the name “Rubalcava House,” but I’m willing to negotiate. The point is, there are too many students at Harvard. Maybe our admissions standards are getting too lax (I would be Exhibit A in that court case), or maybe our admissions officers and House masters have an optimistic view of what constitutes “living space.” Come by my room, Larry—it’s Eliot K-31. I’ll show you the partition that my roommates and I had to build to give us even a simulacrum of privacy. Students all over the River Houses—and even a few Quaddies, I hear—have to build these things to avoid driving our roommates insane. And then I walk through the vast open spaces of the Radcliffe Institute, and I can’t help but think what a wonderful location it would be for Rubalcava House. Can’t you just picture it, Larry? Lovely—lovely, I tell you.

In any case, Larry, feel free to e-mail me at arubalc@fas.harvard.edu if you have any questions. I’m happy to consult with you on any spending projects you’d like to undertake in your first year. Of course, Larry, nothing in life is free. My going rate is $19,000,000,000 per project.

Alex F. Rubalcava ’02 is a government concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.