Timesed

It seems a little churlish to quibble when you've made the New York Times but we were, in fact, not in deficit before covid. We faced the usual pressures on tuition-driven institutions of higher education, magnified by New York prices, America's outsourcing of health care to employers and the toxic effects of the Trump regime for schools with significant bodies of international students. The growth of wasteful upper administration, too, is par for the course in the whole sector.

There is an interesting story to tell about institutions which don't strive to produce wealthy alums, but a better researched piece might have pointed out that for most of our 100 years we didn't rely on (or even have!) an alumni association because most of our students didn't get degrees. We also entered the endowment game very late, for quixotic idealistic reasons of our own - and for much of our history we were dependent on philanthropy. For a good while later we were dependent on the design school, and in recent years we've tried to build a budget based on undergraduate tuition (like most tuition-driven universities). The smart folks in our graduate programs in economics and sociology to whom the author spoke don't see that, or perhaps they mentioned it but the tragedy of idealism made a better story.

None of this changes the fact that we are in very dire straits right now, but it would be nice for ha-ha stories about us to be more accurate.