Andrew Martin

So everybody looks tired. We're all uncertain about what the future looks like.

No. No. There is not.

Some of us aren't that tech savvy.

I can certainly talk about it. I know the information well.

There are certain things you can't put on a grant. You know, you can't put a building on a grant.

Most equipment you can't put on a grant.

Correct.

About $3 billion comes in from patient care revenue. And that actually swamps the rest of what we do at the university.

It's a lot of money.

But in the pie overall, tuition is actually a little part of the pie.

So endowments aren't like piggy banks. We could go to maybe 5%, 5.5%. But anything beyond that would mean that we would start degrading the corpus of the endowment. And the way I think about it is that you never would take out a mortgage on your house to pay for your food bill.

If you look at our financial statements today, our total cash reserve is a little north of $2 billion.

We can't use all of it.

Correct. Because the problems that we're facing are long-term structural problems.

Higher education is a global market, right? There are people dying to attract as many students from around the world as we do here in the United States. There are other countries, particularly China, that are investing heavily in research and technology, in biomedical science, because they see an opportunity to very quickly become as competitive as we are in the United States.

I would hate for us as a country to lose the battle that we've already won.

Our institutions are individually going to be weaker. And what that means practically is that as a nation, we're going to be weaker.

Yes, I am the person that's guiding the big old complicated ship.

Totally. I mean, the pace of things coming out of the federal government, it's almost something every day. Whether a new executive order, a request for information, possible change in regulation and the like, that velocity has been pretty challenging.

And not only did they stop any future money, but we were asked to return all unspent money as well.

That's the reality of what happens when you cancel a contract to do research.

Yes, we've had to let some employees go who were employed on specific research grants.

I don't know what Washington University is going to look like in six or 12 months. And I think as we think about higher education systemically, we have the same concerns.

Not in my lifetime.

Universities and the federal government entered into an agreement right after World War II. And the purpose was to build the very best scientific research engine in the world. And we did it. And we're concerned that some of the actions that are being taken are going to destroy something incredible that we've built together since the end of World War II.