A perfect example of how this guy is completely unserious, a scammer if not a dummy, picking off credulous "populists" one by one, proving mostly that he is smarter than they are. Would Princeton take a few mil in windfall federal money? Sure! Does it care, or need it? NOT AT ALL https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1252999857092075526

There's no lever here. If you were actually serious about the obscene accumulation of massive endowments in higher ed, you would TAX THEM.

Any non-profit endowment with net assets in excess of, say $1 billion: a 1% annual tax on U. Penn's endowment would equal the ENTIRE PA state allocation to the University of Pittsburgh, just for example.

You might also talk about taxing non-mission property accumulated by big private universities while you're at it, all that Manhattan and Cambridge real estate that is not actually used for dorms and classrooms.

But Hawley and the Right Populist brigade, who are all just savvier operators peddling warmed-over MAGA bullshit, won't go down that road, because at the end of yonder path lies a practicable national wealth tax. If you can do it to Harvard, you can do it to a Zuck or a Koch.

And while Hawley might talk a big game about corporate concentration, you certainly don't see much appetite for actually constraining the oligarchic class in any way.

Anyway, back to endowments. I could *imagine* a serious proposal related to federal funding, but it wouldn't be Dept. of Ed money. It would be NSF and DOD, where all the big research bucks come from.

At the end of the day, this is just cheap posturing for the cheaper seats, yanking an easy cultural target (Harvard! Booo!) and proposing a superficially satisfying slap to the face for the rubes who think the Department of Ed is in league with the UN and the black helicopters.

In reality, it's weak-sauce, campaign-season palaver designed to satiate the *cultural* predilections of the jingoistic, Enemy-of-the-Week style that has ALWAYS accompanied right pseudo-populism. Not policy, not a proposal, and NOT a threat to concentrated power.

I have worked in non-profit and higher ed throughout my career. The accumulation of underutilized investment portfolios by elite institutions in education, philanthropic foundations, and to a lesser extent the arts, is a legitimate social and economic problem.