$15 Billion Is Enough to Fight A President
If not now, when? I'm launching Progressive Disclosure by sharing my new NYT essay on why universities must tap their endowments to save themselves.
Progressive Disclosure
I’m sharing this first newsletter with you as someone I’ve corresponded or collaborated with over the years. I’m calling it Progressive Disclosure. I’ve thought about trying this for a while. I’m finally taking the plunge to share with you an NYT op-ed that I published this week calling on wealthy universities to spend their endowments to fight Trump’s attacks. When it comes to spending their tens of billions, I ask, if not now, when? I figured I should take my own advice.
If you want to take action to encourage university leaders to fight back, you can add your signature to an open letter here. It’ been signed by thousands of academics around the country.
What will this newsletter be?
Progressive Disclosure has multiple meanings for me. The least interesting meaning is that while I’m professionally an economic sociologist, a lot of my research has progressive policy and political implications. What does progressive mean to me? I’m hoping to explore this as my thinking is shifting through my research, life experiences, and the extraordinary political upheaval of our day. How much will I disclose about myself? We’ll see. Tell me what you’d like to know.
I’m more enamored of the idea of progressive disclosure as an interactive design method — and as a method of thinking. Progressive disclosure allows a viewer or user to zoom in and the trees in vivid detail or zoom out for view of the full forest. Or to observe the forest from above or from the ground up. I’ve been engaging with this idea for a while through the data visualization work of W.E.B. Du Bois. In their beautiful book, Whitney Battle Baptiste and Britt Russert note that Du Bois used progressive disclosure by plotting multiple graphs together to visualize Black life in 1900 across multiple dimensions, including space, time, and racial boundaries. In its best applications, progressive disclosure can help us to understand the relationship between the micro-level workings of life and macro-level systems.
I’ve tried to draw on Du Bois’ approach to progressive disclosure in my own data visualization and writing. But progressive disclosure also resonates with my passion for exploring the mountains of California’s Sierra Nevadas. As a backcountry skier and runner, I am drawn to the multiple perspectives one gains when navigating through forests, climbing mountains, or sitting atop a peak.
What You Can Expect
I only plan to send you something when I think it’s worth sharing with you. I’m hoping this will be around once a month. We’ll see. I will try to confine what I write to areas where I really have expertise — economic sociology, financiers, elites, universities, open science methods, data visualization, and my own social experiences, including a dash of backcountry skiing.
I will probably combine multiple topics or pieces of news in a single newsletter so as to spare your in-box.
On that note, you may be interested in a new academic article I recently published with Albina Gibadullina: “Elite embeddedness: the rise of financiers on university boards as parallel social organizations.” Published in Socio-Economic Review, the article is a much denser companion to my op-ed from yesterday. It traces how private equity and hedge fund managers rose to dominate university boards of trustees. The blockbuster finding in the paper is that private equity funds tend to achieve higher investment returns after their partners gain a seat on a top university board. We argue that this likely occurs because other business elites on the board provide access to valuable information and relationships for private equity investing. My book, Bankers in the Ivory Tower, provides a broader historical account of this transformation. These publications may offer some insights as to why elite universities have surrendered rather than spend their endowments to defend themselves from Trump’s attacks.
I’d Love to Hear from You
If you have reactions to anything I share, I’d love to hear back from you. I think you can just hit reply. Please also feel free to send me anything you write, read, or make that you think I’d be interested in. When it’s a great fit, I may include it in the news letter. Please also let me know if there’s anything you’d like to me to devote more attention to in the newsletter.
There’s no need to pay for this newsletter. I don’t plan to do paid content. But you’re welcome to chip in to support me, especially if Trump gets the University of California to eliminate my job.
If all this isn’t a match for you, and you need to unsubscribe, I totally get it. Either way, thanks for considering whether to join this experiment with me.
My friend, I took a look at your CV, and based on the year of your B.A., 2002, I presume that you were born around the year that I graduated from high school - and that would be 1980.
Now, in these last FORTY-FIVE years that I've been around since graduating from high school, and those forty-five years include five years in the Navy, many hours working in factories, in landscaping, in farming, going to evening classes, eleven years total in order to finally earn a degree in economics - what ELSE POSSIBLY, could have occurred in the world of higher education, that would be as equally relevant, if not more so, than those things you care about and write about?
And the answer is ..... THE NUMBER OF CHARLIE EATONs THAT CAME OFF THE ASSEMBLY LINE!
I appreciate your openness to suggestions. How about a look at how much of public school budgets go to Pearson and other players in the education industry? Liberals seem to believe charter schools have pioneered the making of private profit off public schools, but those who actually know the landscape beg to differ. As a next focus, it would be great if you could look at how Big Education has profoundly influenced what kids do in school all day. It’s certainly not determined by what’s actually interesting to young people. Thanks, and best of luck on the new venture!