<p>All endowments aren’t created equal. Hospitals are a huge endowment suck. Yale, Duke, and Chicago have one, Penn has more than one; Harvard, Princeton, and MIT don’t have one. So are business schools, which tend to attract more donations than they can possibly spend. (More points for Princeton, which doesn’t have a business school.)</p>
<p>All of these universities are incredibly wealthy institutions, of a sort the world has never seen before, except for actual countries, and the Catholic Church. When I was in college, Yale’s endowment was less than 5% of what it is today. Hand-wringing about whether an endowment of $6 billion or $7 billion is enough, and how fast it should take you to raise more than $3 billion, is kind of the epitome of a first-world problem.</p>
<p>@alicejohnson: Robert Zimmer has been a faculty member at Chicago since 1977, leaving only for four years as Provost at Brown. John Boyer, the Dean of the College, has been at Chicago continuously for over 45 years, since starting graduate school there in 1968. He has been Dean for over 20 years, serving under four rather different Presidents (and reappointed by three of them – you have no idea how extraordinary that is). They know more about the core values of the University than you do, and are better qualified to be stewards of them.</p>