By Frederic J. Fransen
Sunday, May 17, 2026
America’s elite universities are finally acknowledging
they have problems. Among the most serious: They’re perceived as echo chambers
for just one side in the ongoing national conversation about America’s past,
present, and future. As Representative Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.), Harvard
alumna, writes in her new book Poisoned Ivies, “it simply does not
register to many faculty and administrators that their view of the world is
wildly to the left of the American mainstream, or that this could be a problem.
Yet the left-wing monoculture of the university today has an immiserating effect
on intellectual life.”
It won’t be easy to make things right — as the early
efforts of Harvard and Yale indicate.
Yale has chosen to do what large bureaucracies often do
when faced with problems: They delay, by calling for “internal reviews.”
Harvard has chosen another common tactic: to deflect, asking alumni and other
donors for huge sums of money to fix a problem the university played a
significant role in creating.
In an April report, Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education
acknowledged (but neither concurred with nor rejected) the “echo chamber”
charge. Committee members did concede, in no uncertain terms, however, that
“echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” The
committee went on to propose that the university “undertake a multi-pronged
series of initiatives and experiments, with the goal of enhancing open and
critical debate.” The committee offered examples of several possible initiatives
but left any decision-making for the future.
While the university was urged to devote “substantial
resources” to these future efforts, it also was urged to spend the 2026–27
academic year on “self-studies” (known elsewhere as navel-gazing), analyzing
the breadth and depth of the echo-virus in each department and school — a
seemingly unnecessary exercise at a university where Democratic faculty members
outnumber Republican faculty by a ratio estimated “at more than 36 to 1,” and where 27 of the
43 academic departments that grant undergraduate degrees have no Republican
faculty at all.
Perhaps the reason the Yale committee was in no hurry to
advocate specific actions that might improve teaching, research, and
scholarship is that time is needed to monetize any future activities. Those
“substantial resources” need to come from somewhere.
That’s clearly the calculation Harvard has made. And on
that score, Harvard seems to be ahead. According to reports in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard officials
for months have been discreetly banging the tin cup, asking potential donors
for big money to endow an undisclosed number of new academic chairs, presumably
for a cadre of right-of-center scholars. The stated objective: “viewpoint diversity”;
the asking price: $10 million each.
Harvard and Yale are arguably the two most prominent
universities in the United States. There can be no argument about their wealth,
however: Harvard’s endowment, at last report, was about $57 billion,
and Yale’s about $44 billion. One billion dollars is a million dollars a
thousand times ($1,000,000 x 1,000). At $10 million a pop, Harvard easily could
afford to add 250 new faculty chairs. The total cost would be $2.5 billion —
which would reduce Harvard’s endowment to a mere $54–$55 billion.
Which raises the question: Does Harvard want to solve a
problem, or does it see an opportunity to add to its endowment?
I’ve been looking over universities’ shoulders (and
advising potential university donors) for some 30 years. Universities are
notorious for promising one thing and doing another. Bait and switch is
endemic.
When Thomas Hollis III endowed the first professorship in
the United States at Harvard, it was to go to a man who was “in Communion with
some Christian Church of one of the three denominations, Congregational,
Presbyterian or Baptist” and who would adhere to strict orthodox standards in
his teaching. Today’s holder of the Hollis chair is affiliated with the
Episcopal Church and studies early Christian heresy. I have nothing against
Episcopalians, but that’s not what Hollis’s gift requires.
When Nicholas Boylston endowed a chair in rhetoric and
oratory at Harvard, he intended it to be used to train students in public
speaking and rhetoric. The first holder of the chair, John Quincy Adams, was a gifted orator, known as “Old Man Eloquent” during his
presidency and long tenure in the House of Representatives. Today’s holder of
the Boylston chair is a gifted poet, but her work is unrelated to helping
students become better speakers.
This idea of creating chairs aligned with a set of ideas
has been tried before. In the 1970s, more than 150 chairs in free enterprise
were created at universities across the country. Few, if any, are still held by
economists who advocate the free market system. Some teach the opposite.
Funding a chair or professorship is functionally
equivalent to contributing to the university’s general budget. The donor pays
the line item for the professor, freeing up his former salary to be used
elsewhere.
Worse, endowed chairs are typically given to professors
toward the end of their careers. After they retire, their successor may have an
entirely different agenda.
Sometimes universities don’t even wait that long. I
worked with a family several years ago that wanted to create a chair in
Austrian school economics. The university was happy to create a Friedrich A.
Hayek Chair, named for the prominent Austrian economist and Nobel Prize winner.
What the school didn’t tell the family was that it had no intention of allowing
the Hayek chair to be filled with someone specializing in Austrian economics.
After the school’s real agenda became clear, the family moved on — taking their
gift with them.
If endowed chairs are such a bad investment, why are they
so popular?
My theory is that it’s the price. An endowed chair
usually costs several million dollars. That hits a sweet spot for a relatively
large number of wealthy parents and alumni. Creating a new school or funding a
new building requires gifts many multiples of the size of an endowed chair,
putting such gifts out of reach of most donors.
Moreover, development offices have lots of ways to pitch
the idea to anyone with a million or so charitable dollars, even if the money
won’t fully fund a chair. One way is to accept the funding but not fill the
position until additional funds are generated. (UCLA, at one time, acknowledged
having 86 “endowed chairs” with no professor occupying them.)
There are lots of ways for donors to get value out of a
donation to a college or university. If they care about what is done with the
money, however, endowing a chair is not among them. It is much more
cost-effective for a donor to provide discretionary funds to a specific
professor whose work the donor wishes to support. The cost is a fraction of a
chair, and the professor (and his or her students) will actually see more
benefit.
Most of the problems facing American colleges and
universities today are self-created. Donors should be cautious about bailing
them out.
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