RETOX: Blue Civil War Escalates:

Connecticut Democrats are going after Yale, for the same reason Henry VIII went after the monks and Willie Sutton went after the banks. . . .

There is a widespread (and well-founded) perception that the top university endowments are approaching irrational levels—Yale’s chief Ivy League rival has been called a large hedge fund with a small research institute attached to it.

Meanwhile, desperate cities and states—caught between the unplayable pension promises created by decades of irresponsible governance, bloated workforces organized into unions that keep asking for more, poor residents wanting and needing more basic services, and rich residents threatening to flounce out of town unless they get more ‘amenities’—have no choice but to scrounge under the couch cushions for extra cash. And university endowments are a prime target. . . .

From the point of view of much of the public, highly-endowed colleges are becoming an underperforming asset: The feeling is growing that elite fat cat universities are an expensive luxury, and that the money spent propping up their endowments would be better spent buying school lunches for needy kids, or topping off up the pensions of retired civil servants.

For many years, colleges have fended off the fiscal claims of local authorities by pointing to the jobs they create and to the spending of their students and staff. These were and are valid arguments, but the great American private universities are going to have to take a hard look at what else they can do to make more friends among the general public and, consequentially, among politicians.

Once Henry VIII discovered that you could squeeze gold coins from wealthy monastic foundations, he decided to squeeze harder. American politicians are no stupider than he was, and the need for revenue to feed Big Blue Machine is continuing to grow. The people who rule the Ivory Tower should start to take note.

What’s funny is that university faculties supported all the social programs and fat civil-servant pay-and-benefit packages that produced the problem. If they’d had Andrew Mellon’s politics, things might be different. Choose the form of your destructor!