Look at all the money these universities keep in their endowments! Why do they need federal grant money at all?

Harvard is sitting on a dragon’s hoard of $52 billion, amounting to over $2 million per student. Why do they even charge tuition? Why should the federal government subsidize research at an institution already rolling in money?

Here’s a very good answer.

Despite the common terminology, there is not “an endowment” at universities large or small. The endowment is not a single pool of money, waiting to be used for whatever purpose the university deems fit, such as financial emergencies. In reality, the endowment is a collection of thousands of funds representing gifts from particular donors with a legal agreement attached. These gifts are generally for something specific: scholarships, support for a named department or center, or research on a particular disease. Moreover, the principal of the endowment can’t legally be spent down. A condition of the gift is that it is held to generate future income.

Harvard is a very old university and you could argue that their endowment is the product of inherited wealth — the rich get richer year after year. But they can’t touch the core endowment, only the profits generated by it, and even some of that gets reinvested in the endowment, where it’s locked away forever.

The article looks at a newer university, the University of Michigan, with it’s $19 billion endowment.

Let’s take the University of Michigan, where I work, as an example. It has one of the largest public university endowments, at $19.2 billion. Roughly three-quarters is legally restricted for specific purposes established by donors. Distributions from the endowment are spent in a variety of areas, with 28% going to student financial aid—sometimes quite generally, sometimes for very specific awards—25% to patient care at the hospital, and 15% to research. So while the unrestricted portion of the endowment does allow some room for maneuvering, most of “the endowment” cannot just be redirected to compensate for a reduction in NIH support for overhead costs or other federal cuts. Michigan estimates that the proposed change in NIH funding would create a $181 million annual hole in its budget. The endowment might help cover some of those costs in the short run, but it cannot fill the hole.

My alma mater didn’t make the list — the University of Washington endowment is “only” $5.5 billion, while the University of Oregon has $1.6 billion. The University of Minnesota has $5.9 billion. None of that money can be redirected to cover indirect costs, by law.

And how much money are these universities going to lose by the savage beancounters who plan to slash indirect costs to 15%?

Ouch. The UW is going to have an $86 million shortfall. All the major research universities are looking at budget cuts on the order of $100 million. Where’s that money going to come from? Not their endowments, we already determined that. Not from state funding — we’re all operating on shoestrings there already.

I guess in the process of destroying the federal government, American education and scientific research are going to be collateral damage.

Yesterday, I was wondering what Elon Musk would do with 3 million emails describing what every federal worker did last week. We didn’t have to wait long, we now know what the plan was.

Responses to the Elon Musk-directed email to government employees about what work they had accomplished in the last week are expected to be fed into an artificial intelligence system to determine whether those jobs are necessary, according to three sources with knowledge of the system.

The information will go into an LLM (Large Language Model), an advanced AI system that looks at huge amounts of text data to understand, generate and process human language, the sources said. The AI system will determine whether someone’s work is mission-critical or not.

Nice. Big Brother AI is going to analyze your email to determine whether you should be fired or not.

Trump & Musk don’t care what you write. They’re looking for pretexts to dismantle the federal government.

Tina Smith, one of our Minnesota senators, has announced that she won’t be running for another term, unfortunately. Or is that good? Can we get some young progressive DFL radical to fill her position? But as she enters the final leg of her term, she’s fighting back.

Bravo! Keep resisting!

This is an easy one to fight, at least. The order from Elon Musk is an ultimatum, sent out by someone with no official authority. It’s an incredibly stupid email.

With the subject line What did you do last week? the email demanded that every recipient reply to this email with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager. It then reassuringly instructed employees, do not send [emphasis Musk’s, I mean OPM’s, or whatever] any classified information, links, or attachments and finished with a deadline of this Monday at 11:59pmEST which was for some very phishy reason hyperlinked.

I am not averse to accountability — I just got an email from my division chair informing me that it’ll be time form my yearly review of what I’ve been up to, and that’s fine. I expect my local administrator to want to be aware of all faculty activity, and to file away that information as a record of my responsibilities. But she has the authority and responsibility (and, by the way, was elected by the faculty to perform that role). Anyone could send me an email demanding that I list what I did last week, but I get to laugh and click delete.

But this…this is madness. The Department of Government Efficiency thinks the way to enhance that efficiency is to demand that all employees file a list of what they did last week to some random email address? Last week…are they going to make this part of the weekly routine? What are they going to do with it? And just five?

OK, I’m not a federal employee, but here’s my list:

• Fed the spiders
• Cleaned the spider cages
• Fed the spiders again
• Turned over the mealworm substrate
• Repaired some spider silk frames

Those are probably the least significant, least time-consuming tasks I did last week, so I can fulfill the letter of the request while not informing them of anything important that I accomplished.

What baffles me, though, is that the US has roughly 3 million federal employees. What will they do with 3 million emails pouring in to Musk’s office? The link above has an idea: they’re just going to shovel them all into an AI as training data, and possibly to search for fireable statements.

Actually, the best kind of response is like this one, from the department of defense.

That’s right. Just ignore the spam email.

I do wonder if Darin S. Selnick still has his job.

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Here’s a different kind of reaction from a Democrat:

Good god, we have to get rid of these geriatric do-nothings in the Democratic party. By the way, Gerry Connolly was chosen by house democrats over AOC to chair the oversight committee.

This is why Democrats lose.

Way back when I was a young kid going into a science career, I knew ahead of time that the pay was going to be crap and I was going to have to scramble for a new position every few years, and that I was going to have to move multiple times to destinations unknown. That was the job. My expectations were low (maybe too low — who’s stupid enough to pursue a career like that?) but I just wanted to do science and teach and have a satisfying intellectual life. We made enough money to scrape by, and there was enough of a demand that I felt I could probably land a new position at a university somewhere if one job fell through. I came from a generation where science was a viable, if not particularly lucrative, career.

That has changed.

For one postdoc, uncertainty about whether the funding for her awarded “diversity” fellowship from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) will come through means she’s spending valuable time writing more applications instead of doing research. For another, learning that the “dream job” he’d been offered at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was being withdrawn because of the federal hiring freeze has left him clinging to his current position—and $5000 poorer because he already canceled his lease in preparation for moving. And a Ph.D. student whose dream is to one day lead a planetary mission at NASA is “panicking” about her professional future.

These are just a few of the countless researchers reeling after President Donald Trump’s administration unleashed a wave of actions over the past month—freezing funds, firing thousands of federal employees, upending programs and research related to gender and diversity, and more. Scientists of all stripes have been affected, but none more so than early-career researchers, a group already struggling with low pay and job insecurity. Now, some wonder how many of those budding researchers will throw in the towel and leave science, or the United States, entirely. “There’s going to be a missing age class of researchers that will reverberate for years,” one federal scientist fears.

Chopping out a whole cohort of researchers is a catastrophe. What happens in 10 years, 20 years, the time when all these young people should be in their prime, producing great new ideas and data? There was a time 30 years ago when I was tempted by opportunities to work in industry, and I said no, and committed to academic research. I’d be deeply conflicted if I faced that kind of situation now. Or not…maybe those academic avenues would be simply closed.

Young researchers also face the prospect that positions for graduate students and postdocs will dwindle because of broader scale cuts to research funding—for instance, the threatened reduction in the indirect costs that universities charge to carry out research funded through federal grants. As graduate school admission decisions are being made, faculty at several research-intensive universities—including Vanderbilt University and the University of Washington—have been told to reduce the size of their incoming cohorts, the health news site STAT reported.

Or wait…what if you decided to leave the academic track and pursue a career in industry, just like all your peers?

Many of the federal scientists fired this month are also early in their careers. “I feel like I was robbed of a career,” says one biologist who was terminated from his position at the U.S. Geological Survey on 14 February. Another fired scientist, who had started a position at USDA in 2023 after finishing a 3-year postdoc, says he had “envisioned this being my last job—one I would be in for 20 or more years.”

They’re now suddenly in an uncertain position, with a new set of financial challenges and anxiety about where they’ll be able to find work next. “I’m not optimistic about an already competitive job market that is going to be flooded with qualified scientists,” one said.

I never thought my career timing was particularly good — I was always being informed that there was going to be a wave of opportunities as older faculty retired, but that it was going to be ten years in the future. It was always 10 years from now, kind of like Elon Musk’s predictions about when we’d be living on Mars. Those predictions always failed anyway, just like the fantasy of Mars colonies. But now I think maybe I got lucky. I’m reaching the end of my career just as American science is being taken out back behind the chemical sheds by a gang of psychopathic fascists.

That doesn’t help my daughter, who has just begun a career in science.