The whole point of an endowment is to support whatever it was created to support in perpetuity. They do that by investing the endowment and using most of the income from those investments to support the endowment's mission, and a small part to grow the endowment over time.
Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment, which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22 billion.
Penn's endowment distributed $1.1 billion last year. Endowments like this are managed to last a long time - indefinitely, even.
Penn itself is older than the United States - they're not going to start blowing through their endowment because of political trends over the last couple months (or next 4 years), even if they legally could.
As one simple example, some funds are for endowed chairs, named after donors or companies. For example, in computer science at Carnegie Mellon, we have chairs named for Richard King Mellon, Kavčić-Moura, Thomas and Lydia Moran, and more. (You can see a full list here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~scsfacts/endowed.html)
It costs a few million to create an endowed chair, and these funds can only be used to help offset salary costs for that professor (thus helping with the budget for the department) and for research associated with that professor. You can't just use all of the money in these endowed chairs for other things that people in this thread are suggesting, it's not fungible.
You know, folks on HN often re-post links to Chesterton's Fence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...), about trying to understand how things are done and why, before tearing things down and potentially causing more problems. I'd highly suggest the folks in this thread that are exhibiting a lot of anger about academia keep Chesterton's Fence in mind. Yes, academia has problems (as do all human institutions and organizations), but the amount of good academia offers is quite vast in terms of advances in science, arts, education, public discourse, startups, and more.
I once encountered an endowment fund that was restricted for use in a defined scholarship. This was problematic because that scholarship could only be given to students of a specific race. Restricting applicants in this way would be illegal under Canada's charter, so for at least a decade the funds were simply not spent. As far as I know nothing has changed.
Chesterton's Fence is also just an argument for conservatism and never changing anything because there is no end to the argument that you don't really understand how things are done and why. Maybe "Academia" does need a bit of a wakeup call. You're lumping in a whole lot under academia and it's not really clear what portion of "academia" and academia dollars are linked to those outcomes you're talking about.
You're attacking a straw man, though. I see a lot of posts here that aren't even considering why something might be the way it is. We haven't gotten to the point where someone might do the "you don't really understand how things are done and why" goalpost-moving dance, and suggesting that of course that's how it's going to play out is unwarranted.
I mean, the initial post in this thread is just completely ignorant. Expecting a university to blow their endowment on a short-term[0] political issue is just ignorant. They spend maybe 5% of their endowment each year, because that is the safe amount to spend, as they want to be able to pull that 5% out, every year, essentially forever. Two minutes of "research" on university endowments would surface this kind of information.
[0] Four or even eight years is nothing to an institution that is older than the United States itself.
Typically, they're set up so that the income goes to a particular purpose, or so that only the income is used. For instance, a big chunk of Harvard's engineering and CS professorships are funded through a donation from a 19th century inventor of machines to make shoes. His intent was to fund professorships in "practical sciences" in perpetuity, and he had particular terms - he wanted salaries to be competitive for instance. The university can't legally spend down the principal or use the money for some other purpose.
It is a trust fund basically. From what I uderstand, the principal is nearly impossible to use/withdraw and you can only use the interest/returns generated from investing the principle.
Even that portion is also restricted. The purpose must be strictly academic and some part must be paid to the university, some must be reinvested, and then the final pieces can be used at the professor's discretion according to the rules set when the endowment is established.
So generally, you are looking at 1-2% of the total amount that can be spent annually. Still a lot, but for research, tens of millions would still not be enough for something like Penn.
At some schools the endowment returns are sufficient to cover operational expenses, which is why they can have such generous financial aid policies (effectively “not charging tuition” for those whom it would matter).
Yeah at the Ivies and equivalents the "tuition" is basically a "suggested donation" and the final bill is based on how much the parents have to give. I'm not sure about room and board.
As the other poster mentioned, endowments / donations often come with conditions attached that significantly restricts how money from them can be used.
Penn is spending around $1 billion/year from their endowment, which is a fairly reasonably amount for an endowment of $22 billion.