On Wednesday morning, I woke up to an e-mail from Chancellor Wrighton detailing the effects of the economy’s downturn on Washington University. To be honest, I thought that this day would never come: I remember remarking, earlier in the year, that you would never know we were approaching a recession if you were just to walk around campus. There was construction everywhere, everything was new-built and overtly luxurious, and I am certain that prospective students could not help but feel a tinge of optimism as they walked around our campus, much as I did when I was in their shoes.
I have realized, in the two years since I was a bright-eyed pre-frosh on a tour, that our university is largely a symbol of what money can buy. The dominant impression of optimism that pervades our campus is wrought by the University’s isolation, by its luxury, by an ignorance easily purchased with wealth. The steps of Brookings are a symbolic testament to this ignorance: looking up from the other side of Skinker, Wash. U. is a castle far up on a cloud, just outside the border of St. Louis City, immune to the financial problems that plague the municipality.
It has always seemed to me that Wash. U. has more than enough money, to the point of ludicrousness. It has risen in the college rankings over the past 20 years by aggressively recruiting students with excessive mailings and well-funded scholarships; it has ensured, time and time again, that students are left with nothing to complain about; it has funded fellowships to buy academic curiosity and guest speakers to buy political awareness. When its Economics Department was ranked poorly, it bought Murray Weidenbaum and Douglass North on board with high salaries in order to gain prestige. In many ways, it is the patriarch of a new-money family who wants his children to have every possible advantage, and who wants desperately to buy his way into an old establishment.
I realize that I sound jaded when I say this, and I feel the need to qualify here that, given the size of its endowment, Washington University has used its resources very effectively. I can mock the amount of mail it sends out, but Wash. U. has risen very effectively in the college rankings. I can mock the fact that it buys students and professors, but the truth is that our university has been able to use its endowment to create a solid, fulfilling, even excellent academic community that can compete with older and arguably more prestigious universities.
So what happens now, at a university that has bought its way to the top and now sees a 25 percent decline in its endowment?
Perhaps it is a vestigial quality of living for two years in an environment of pervasive optimism, but I sincerely hope that the scarcity this decline in endowment creates will give the University a new (and necessary) sense of pragmatism, a sense of what is important and what is not. We get out of economic scarcity by innovation, by craftiness, and I hope that the University will recognize how integral a good education is, to teach the knowledge that will allow us to be crafty. I hope that the University can stop focusing on quality of life and start focusing on quality of education, teaching us to live not in a castle on a cloud, but with our heads on straight and our feet planted firmly in the world.
local homeowner and concerned WashU neighbor
per veritatem vis
Washington University in St. Louis has had a 25 percent decrease in its endowment as a result of America's economic slump. In the past, new buildings were built and high-salaried stellar professors were recruited without much thought of the economic ramifications. This fiscal freedom changed recently when Chancellor Wrighton described the effects of the economy's downturn on the University. Now, the construction of new buildings has been halted, and staff and faculty may be asked to take a paycut. Perhaps this economic downturn will serve as a wakeup call for the University to become more realistic, by placing more emphasis on the world as it really is -- and not focusing on a dreamland or utopia!