Andrew Jack
speaker
29 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Andrew Jack’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
This is Today Explained. My name is Andrew Jack. I'm the global education editor at the Financial Times based in New York. Did you go to Harvard, Andrew? I did have a year on a fellowship at Harvard many years ago. Yes. Oh, you did.
Well, I mean, I think certainly in the sense of some degree of skin in the game, I guess.
Well, Harvard, of course, has been in the sights of the Republicans and Donald Trump for many months. Like other leading universities, Harvard for a long time was very quiet in public. It wouldn't speak out. It wouldn't give interviews. It was going about its business.
And then in recent weeks and months, it's taken a number of moves that some interpreted as attempts to suggest it was responding to to the criticisms of the Trump administration, but also to try and push back any more aggressive enforcement action. So it got rid of some senior leadership at its Middle Eastern Studies Center.
It's got underway, though we're yet to see it, a detailed report on anti-Semitism on campus and a number of other initiatives. But really, After the demands escalated from the Trump administration at the end of last week, it switched and decided that it wouldn't accept the conditions that were sought from the government and that instead it would defend academic integrity and free speech.
We don't know the full story, but clearly this is an evolving situation where also presumably the Trump administration officials are adapting in response to a whole series of other actions they've taken both to the higher education sector across the board and to now something like seven of the most elite universities.
And I suspect that the apparent willingness by Columbia in particular to cede to the demands of the administration gave them a sense of increased empowerment. And so they then stepped up their ask to Harvard.
Then last week, the American Association of University Professors, a network representing professors across the country, themselves took legal action against the administration, if you like, on behalf of Harvard.
So you were getting those pressures from within and pressures from without, and a lot of concern by all those engaged with higher education about the attacks from the Trump administration.
You'd have to go back really to October 23 and student protests.
They barricaded- Of course, Columbia in the heart of New York, lots of TV crews, lots of politicians marching through. So everybody trying to turn it into a test case, and it got very much drawn into the debates during the presidential election.
And then in the last few weeks, we've seen a series of targeted attacks now on seven of the more elite universities, including Columbia and Harvard, but also Cornell and Princeton and Brown, for example, where they've been told that grants have been frozen and they're bracing for further action by the administration, but still waiting somewhat for communications.
And as I said, it looks as though Colombia was the test case. It was one that no doubt the Trump administration considered would be the easiest to go after. And indeed, it's now had two presidents resign within the last few months.
Yes, Colombia's endowment is around about $14, $15 billion. $14, $15 billion.
Well, I mean, the first thing to say that you often hear the pushback from even the very well endowed universities is that, you know, those endowments are a long-term investment in their future operations that, of course, much of that money gets reinvested for the longer term. But the surplus of
Well, and I think, yes. So I think that there's a few things to say here. The first is that certainly much of the surplus income that's generated by endowments is actually used for financial aid. But the second thing is the Ivies argue that, you know, much of the revenue that they generate is
from their endowment, that surplus is actually used to provide discounted or even free tuition for those that are talented but come from lower income backgrounds. So, simply to blow out the endowments is, one, difficult because a lot of those reserves that go into endowments are earmarked by the people who give them, the donors, for specific causes.
But the pressure that we're seeing, the funding withdrawals, the $2.2 billion now at Harvard, for example, that the government says it will withdraw from the university, is actually, well, it's a So this is not, you know, just a subsidy to a rich university to perpetuate their endowment. It's actually money that's very specifically allocated for projects for research for the future of society.
Yes. And I think even at Columbia and a number of the other universities that have been targeted, frankly, despite the complexities we were just discussing, those should provide resources to help them during rainy days. There was a big debate around this after the financial crisis in 2008.
There were discussions around it during COVID, of course, when students had to go online and classes were cancelled and so on. And I think this is absolutely, as if not more, of an existential moment when, frankly, taking some of that endowment money to cover the additional risks involved
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