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by gruez 1935 days ago
>but Stanford has a taxpayer subsidized war-chest of $29 billion

Aren't endowments supposed to last forever? ie. the university can only spend $29B * 5% (or whatever the after inflation return is)

1 comments

Supposed to according to whom? Perpetual organizations that face no market pressure, have governance structures where one board picks the next (and in practice where senior employees have a lot of influence on trustee selection), and which are given massive tax benefits with virtually no strings attached by governments seem like a really bad idea to me. That’s sounds like a petri dish for breeding pathological behavior.