I teach at a public university, and I think that is good. Private education is education (which can be good), but it’s inaccessible to most people (which is not good) and has all kinds of other perverse incentives. If at some point in the future you find me teaching at a private school, you can be reasonably sure that I did it, in part, for the money. Of course I have a great deal of respect for my many colleagues who teach at private institutions: they are not, generally speaking, part of the problem.
Higher education is under assault in the US. An interesting contour of the current battle is how much ire is specifically directed at the elite private universities attended by the same powerful people leading the charge. (Donald, Elon, and I went to one of them.) Is this a First They Came… situation for a public educator? It’s hard to say.
One of the many lines of attack is a proposal to federally tax private endowments at a similar rate to capital gains. I recognize this would be a major blow, at least in the short term, for how these private universities do business. It is motivated by perverse political impulses to which I am opposed. But I can’t actually articulate an ethical reason why private endowment capital gains shouldn’t be taxed like, well, capital gains. Furthermore, it is clear that endowments are increasingly the tail that wags the dog of private education. Alumni donors are at war with actual students at these institutions, and the administrators who are prosecuting this war do so in part because of the power they glean from courting said donors. (The other part, I suspect, is because at least some of these administrators agree on the politics, and/or just want to crack a few heads to get the students back in line more generally, making their day-to-day work, of appeasing the donors, easier.) This is an overall bad situation for the institution, I think, regardless of what the moral truth of the issues are. Recognizing the current moment as exactly the sort of “rainy day” the endowment is ostensibly earmarked for, a private institution could really affect a positive transformation of their campus. I doubt it’d happen that way, but it could.
Let us specifically consider Columbia, which is by all accounts at the center of the conflict, and the similarly expensive (if not quite as “elite”) NYU. Both of these registered 501(c)(3) non-profits, but these two institutions (and no others) are also subject to a number of highly-specific state tax exemptions written directly into New York state law. The Times estimates that these altogether amount to $327m (per annum) state tax break. A lot of this is actually exemptions for property taxes; Columbia owns more land in New York City than any other private entity, followed only by NYU in second place. Much of this is clearly just speculation, since neither have much of a campus. (Both also have a bad habit of abusing adjacent public spaces for their own purposes.) The state assembly has considered a number of bills to remove these exemptions, and most of them focus on returning at least some of the funds to the community. Repealing these exemptions would similarly be a short-term shock to these institutions. But once again, I can’t articulate an ethical argument for why these private institutions should be so exempt, and applying pressure to these institutions to sell off the speculative portion of their real estate portfolio would be good for the institutional soul. I intuit that similar things hold of my (PhD) alma mater, Penn, but I’m less familiar with the issues or law there.
Members of private institutions have my full solidarity against the DOGE boys up until we are discussing taxes, in which case I’ll hold my tongue.