Re: The Drum Beats Louder

Uh, no, Nathaniel, I don’t think that’s it at all . Our disagreement was about your overly-simplistic approach to this question, an approach you continue to take in your most recent post. You said the answers to these questions were “obvious;” I said they weren’t . I posed a series of questions about why and how the government could regulate universities and their endowments; you ignored them and haven’t really replied at all to the thrust of my post.

You most recent claim is just another example of your using over-the-top rhetoric to set up straw-men:

At its core, this is all about the envy of wealth. No one is asking whether it’s okay for a university to have an endowment. But some people see schools with large endowments, and that makes them mad. Are we supposed to suspend the principles behind non-profit taxation because of straightforward resentment?

Could it be that at its core this is all about how to structure the government’s regulation of academic non-profits and their endowments so as to best serve the common good? Maybe the common good would be served best if academic non-profits were subject to the same five percent annual pay-out requirements that other non-profits are subjected to. I don’t know, but it seems a reasonable position. You’ll say that the real proposed measures will only apply to elite schools. Fine. Is there any a priori reason, or, in your terms, any “obvious” reason, why the government can’t treat wealthy and poor colleges differently—-you know, the way they treat wealthy and poor individuals differently?

I don’t claim to be an expert on any of this but when I see the rigorous—and serious—debate of competing sides of the issue on conservative websites like NRO’s Phi Beta Cons blog and the Pope Center for Higher Education, and then I see our coverage, I feel bad—because we’re short-changing the merits of the arguments on the other side.