Hard Times?

Colleges and universities are claiming hardships as endowments plummet. Harvard's 36 billion dollar fund is now in the mid twenties, and they've already implemented a salary freeze and suspended all searches, opting to rely instead on newly minted PhDs in unstable "teaching postdoc" positions. How convenient!

NYU's endowment is at best 1/10th the size of harvard's, despite an undergraduate population that's four times larger, but that hasn't stopped John Sexton and co. from dropping massive amounts of money on prime downtown real estate. The New York observer reports that NYU recently purchased 726 Broadway (which already housed the student health center and the religious studies dept) for $210 million. Sexton, meanwhile, all brilliantly faked financial aid flyers notwithstanding, really is telling students who can't afford the ballooning tuition at NYU to try elsewhere.

Yesterday, student activists at the New School, where faculty just overwhelmingly voted no confidence in University President and former U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey, sat in the administration building for six hours to protest the university's relationship with the military contractor L-3 Communications:

Students were protesting the treasurer of the Board of Trustees,
Robert B. Millard, because of his position as chairman of the
executive committee of the military contractor L-3 Communications.
L-3 Communications provides a large percentage of the "intelligence
personnel" employed in illegal detention centers in Iraq, Afghanistan,
and Guantanamo Bay, and is currently facing four lawsuits from Iraqis
tortured at Abu Ghraib...

The students participating in the sit-in remained patient, relatively
quiet and un-confrontational while they waited to see if the Board
would grant their requests. Other students brought pizza and coffee
to those participating in the sit-in. After about an hour, students
realized the Board was not going to meet with them and they pushed
into the blocked off area, passed the security guards and attempted to
climb the stairs that led to where the Board was meeting. The
security guards prevented the students from entering the meeting and
the students began to lead chants around investment disclosure and the
removal of Millard. The meeting, which was happening directly above
where the students were chanting, was forced to move because of the
demonstrators. The trustees' coats and personal items at the coat
check next to the students were passed up one by one to a staff member
on the stairs. The students moved outside around 6:30pm when they
realized a car was waiting at the basement exit of the building—the
only alternative exit to the front door. The group disbanded around
7pm after most of the Trustees had left the vicinity. A security
guard informed one RSU member that the Board of Trustees meeting,
which was scheduled to end at 8pm, ended an hour and a half early, at
6:30pm.

Speaking of sit-ins, the republic window workers won theirs today, their factory occupation translating into the money owed them as well as a new organization dedicated to repopening their plant. Maybe we really are seeing Buenos Aires style recuperation on the horizon...

Also, there may be social revolutions taking place in Greece and Italy...