By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, April 20, 2021
First, some caveats: I don’t like the way “elite” is used
as a term of abuse; I think it is enormously destructive that right-wing
populists have decided that our best institutions of higher education should be
regarded as class enemies to be defeated rather than important institutions in
need of reform; I think it is unseemly when people sneer that this or that
billionaire is still really, really rich — a billionaire, in fact! — even after
making a big charitable donation; it is a sign of our national soul-sickness
that in certain quarters, philanthropy as such is derided as the new Medici
indulgence or scorned as an analgesic helping to put off the more fundamental
structural economic changes dreamt of by such would-be revolutionaries as
Senator Bernie Sanders. And of all the Democrats and crypto-Democrats who were
running in 2020, Michael Bloomberg would have been my first choice.
That being stipulated, I will confess that reading about
the new Emma Bloomberg Center for Access and Opportunity at Princeton
University caused my eyes to roll so hard you’d have thought I was auditioning
for a role in The Exorcist XVII: The Devil Goes Down to Muleshoe.
Princeton, like practically every other similar
institution in the country, believes that it has a diversity problem. I myself
am not convinced that it does, but Princeton is of course entitled to decide
for itself. Princeton reports that about a quarter of its student body is made
up of “underrepresented minorities,” which is lower than the combined black and
Latino share of high-school graduates in the United States but not radically
so. (And Princeton, with fewer than 9,000 students and one of the country’s
most selective institutions, offers a relatively small data set. Nationally,
African Americans make up about 13 percent of college students, roughly
proportional to their share of the population.) More interesting than the racial-ethnic
breakdown is the fact that a fifth of Princeton’s students come from households
reporting less than $50,000 a year, to me a surprisingly high figure. I see
little to criticize in these figures.
There are two things Princeton and Michael Bloomberg have
in common. One, neither of them needs money: Bloomberg’s net worth is estimated
at around $60 billion, and Princeton’s endowment is about $27 billion, with its
annual endowment income amounting to more than $170,000 per student, a figure
that allows Princeton to offer generous financial-aid packages that allow most
of its students to graduate with no student-loan debt or very little. Some 82
percent of Princeton undergraduates finish debt-free, and the median debt among
those who do borrow is less than $10,000. It is to Princeton’s credit that this
is the very model of how an elite institution of this sort should conduct its
basic business.
The other thing Princeton and Michael Bloomberg have in
common is Emma Bloomberg.
The elder Bloomberg daughter is a richly credentialed
academic striver, having followed her undergraduate degree at Princeton, which
today houses 220 undergraduates at Emma Bloomberg Hall, with a joint graduate
degree in business and public administration from Harvard, which is to be home
to the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University
after a $150 million donation from Bloomberg Philanthropies. She worked for the
Robin Hood Foundation, a nonprofit that has benefited in many ways from its
Bloomberg relationships.
Ms. Bloomberg has the usual insufferable class markers
(her ex-husband’s surname is “Frissora” and their daughter bears the
portmanteau surname Frissberg) and she has spent her career mostly in what
amounts to an extended version of the family business, working in institutions
supported by her father’s money. She also worked in the mayor’s office in New
York — something not entirely surprising for a Bloomberg.
In the great American tradition of starting a club in
order to give yourself something to be in charge of, she founded Murmuration, a
nonprofit that for
a long time did not seem to actually do very much of anything but was
notionally oriented toward education reform until it starting buying up
campaign-oriented enterprises. It employs veterans of such organizations as the
Center for American Progress and the Bloomberg-founded Mayors Against Illegal
Guns, and it rejoices in the services of a vice president of communications who
was until 2015 the “national fan ambassador” for USA Curling — something very
close to the perfect recipe for perfect mediocrity. This is what happens when
Tracy Flick has real money.
In a documentary film about the undistinguished children
of rich people, her sister, Georgina, complained that “it sucks” being a
Bloomberg. She has since had a change of heart. It probably does suck, in some
ways, but it beats flying coach.
Today, Emma Bloomberg sits on the board of Bloomberg
Philanthropies, which will donate $20 million to her alma mater for its new
diversity center, to be named after her. This is the billionaire’s equivalent
to a matching set of logo-covered Louis Vuitton luggage or a Burberry plaid
baseball cap.
It is not the case that a daughter’s making a career out
of her father’s money and connections means that she necessarily is
unaccomplished in her own right — Lucrezia Borgia spoke a half-dozen languages
and held real political power as governor of Spoleto, which gives her a better
claim to having shattered a glass ceiling than anything that could be boasted
of by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was finally unsuccessful in politics as
anything other than extension of the career of her gifted and amoral husband.
But if we must have Bloomie Borgias and modern Medici,
then we really need an updated version of the old aristocratic manners and
perhaps even a touch of — difficult as it is to imagine, given the character of
the people we are talking about — the self-effacing discretion that
characterized earlier generations of moneyed patrons.
It is vulgar to name an institution after someone living
in exchange for money. It is vulgar when Michael Bloomberg does it on his own
behalf, and it is triple-double vulgar when he does it on behalf of his
daughter, who is barely 40 years old and is lightly accomplished
at best.
It is probably a bad idea to name an institution after a
living person in general for almost any reason — especially in light of our
recent convulsions over things named for people who died 500 years ago.
This sort of vulgarity is far from unknown at
institutions such as Princeton, which is home to the Frist Campus Center and
has seen various members of the Frist family frolicking about its exclusive
campus. It even has been suggested in some quarters that these two
developments may be somehow linked! Our norms should discourage very
strongly this kind of self-aggrandizement, but the trend seems to be in the
opposite direction: Princeton also will be home to a new dormitory named for
Mellody Hobson, the second Mrs. George Lucas, a sprightly youthful Princetonian
born the year the billionaire film director married his first wife.
Perhaps the Frissbergs — or maybe even the Fristbergs, in
the happy event of such a conjunction! — will do better when it is their
generation’s turn.
And while I will here repeat that $20 million is a great
deal of money irrespective of how much more than that one has, that Michael
Bloomberg could have bought his daughter a private island (why settle for semi-private?) rather than plaster her name
(which is also his name) on an Ivy League institution (for a second time), that
the philanthropic impulse should be generally encouraged, etc., it is worth
noting that this is another excellent example of the way that the elites who
dominate our political discourse and our policy-making institutions are —
inevitably — obsessed with their own interests and constrained by their own
experiences.
The social situation of African Americans is, in many
ways, a scandal: twice the average poverty rate (and three times the white
poverty rate), four times the national average felony-conviction rate, shorter
life expectancy, etc. But the social situation of people who are black and who
also are plausible candidates for admission to Princeton is a different story.
Students who might end up at Princeton if there is a bit more enthusiastic
diversity outreach aren’t going to Rikers Island if they fail to get into
Princeton — they’re going to Stanford or Penn or Duke or — angels and ministers
of grace defend us! — Berkeley. The people who need help are not promising
young black Princeton applicants — they are black high-school dropouts, and, indeed,
high-school dropouts of all races. They are addicts and people with
mental-health problems, felons attempting to reenter society and find decent
work, etc.
Of course, we as a nation can walk and chew gum at the
same time — but we don’t.
We don’t have Bloombergs — or the former Mrs. Jobs, or the former Mrs. Bezos, or Mrs. Gates, or
other representatives of the billionaire-dilettante class — lined up
to be the next principal of Milwaukee’s North Division High School.
But for the sake of the country — and for the sake of its most vulnerable
people — fixing what’s wrong at North Division is going to matter a great deal
more than seeing to it that Princeton has one more thing named after the
Bloombergs.
Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood. The press loves a
story about the press. The people who dominate the political conversation,
philanthropy, and the policy-making process cannot help but be most intensely
interested in themselves. That is human nature.
One of the many blessings of a market-oriented economy —
besides the fact that somebody has to earn those billions
before they can be given away — is that markets are one of the few social
institutions that really force us to think about other people’s lives and
aspirations and that reward us for satisfying other people’s needs and desires.
Government agencies can be run — indefinitely — for the benefit of their
employees, and philanthropic endeavors can persist for years in vanity, crankery, and incompetence. Which is not to say
that we do not need good government and effective philanthropy — we certainly
do. But we should appreciate how powerful is the urge to build monuments to
oneself and to create high-class sinecures for one’s family and allies.
For every Pope Alexander VI there is a Savonarola in
waiting.
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