Not Good News

modestmelody
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 11:43:46 +0000

Well, obsessive, it is having some slightly more serious effects than that, but only in the context of Brown, rather than relative to everywhere else.

The schools that are going to be really hurt are those middle schools that have spent a ton of money recently making their campuses rather modern to compete with the aging facilities of older prominent schools like Brown. They have far less money in the bank and did a lot of deficit spending to build these structures. Financial viability for those places ten years out is not looking good at all.

We’ve been building a lot lately and doing more deficit spending in the past, but we’ve far from bankrupted ourselves. The largest effects is that the increased faculty will not have increased graduate students to compensate for their new size and several pertinent construction projects will not be started until later than anticipated as we wait for more donations to come in. That nice new fitness center with a swimming complex, the Creative Arts Center, the renovation of Faunce, the Mind Brain Center, and the Center for Nanotechnology are all probably going to be placed at least on hold while finances sure up and money trickles in at a slow pace.

We’ll be fine, financial aid will be fine, but our rapid improvement that’s been going on for the last 8 years or so is going to be put on pause.

Really, it’s too bad that Brown didn’t have better leadership with the two presidents before Ruth. Fundraising at that time seemed like a non-priority compared to now, resources were not handled well, general organization to watch spending and also to expand and spend coherently was largely lacking.

I don’t agree with everything Ruth has done but she has provided structure that our short lived presidencies of the 90s really screwed up with. If not for the changes in the actual university, the changes in governance and administrative structure under Ruth has probably made us significantly more secure than we would have been under some others in our recent past.

If the economy does not improve in the next 6-8 months significantly, I expect to see many medium universities drop significant portions of their school and many top universities scrambling to rapidly restructure.