The widespread demands on universities include:

Don't charge full tuition for online-only teaching
Don't cut faculty salaries or furlough faculty
Don't cut staff salaries or lay off staff
Extend graduate student funding by a year

1/

This is imagined to work mainly a focus on the massive-endowment elite privates, HYPS in particular.

The endowment question is more complicated than is often suggested, since "spend countercyclically" can translate to "buy when the market is high, sell when it's low."
2/

But even if the right answer for HYPS is to liquidate enough endowment to keep spending steady, that's just not the universe most colleges and universities inhabit.

For most of them, most of their revenue is tuition.

3/

If we think with one moment "unfair to charge the consumers, students (or parents), full price for the inferior product of online-only education," we have to think in the next moment of the things a firm needs to do when the price it can charge for its product falls.

4/

Most obviously, that would mean reducing labor expenses.

There's no squaring this circle from within the university's own resources. No, cutting lazy rivers and vice-deans and the football team that should be abolished on other grounds aren't enough.

5/

I sure as heck don't have any magic wand solution here. I'm very glad not to be in admin right now, with responsibility for making the choices.

But there are big losses out there right now and they're going to fall *somewhere.*

6/6