Chris Powell: Why Trump is squeezing Yale, et al.
In simpler times: Front view of “Yale-College" and the chapel, printed by Daniel Bowen in 1786.
MANCHESTER, Conn.
For many years the ravenous far left in Connecticut has advocated taxing Yale University, in New Haven. Yale's endowment long has been managed spectacularly well and now totals more than $40 billion, the second-largest university endowment in the country, trailing only Harvard's.
Indeed, the popular joke is that Yale is a hedge fund masquerading as a university. The popular resentment is that about 57 percent of real estate in New Haven is exempt from municipal property taxes and most of that exempt property, worth about $3.5 billion, is owned by Yale.
Financial aid from state government and “payments in lieu of taxes" makes up for some of the foregone property-tax revenue but far from all of it. Of course, if Yale's property was fully subject to the city's property tax, the city wouldn't be any better off, given its awful management, but city employees might be able to retire at full pay after only two or three years on the job, since the satisfaction of its employees is city government's highest objective.
Now reform is coming to Yale not because of leftists in Connecticut but, ironically, because of President Trump and the narrow Republican majority in Congress.
Their new federal tax and spending law imposes progressive taxes on college endowments. The biggest endowments, like Yale's, will be taxed at 4 percent a year, and one study estimates that this will clip Yale's for $1.5 billion over five years.
Of course Trump and the Republicans aren't taxing college endowments out of any liberal belief in wealth redistribution. They are taxing the endowments because higher education has become a great engine of the political left and the Democratic Party, which is also why Connecticut state government, a leftist Democratic operation, has declined to tax the endowments of private colleges (Yale's particularly) and has declined to subject private colleges (again, Yale particularly) to municipal property taxes.
The Republicans want to cut higher education down to size politically while the Democrats want to keep it a strong source of patronage and propaganda.
Trump and the Republicans are right for the wrong reasons, but that's better than being wrong. For as the college loan disaster has shown, higher education's importance to the country is grossly overestimated. The country's education problem is lower education, as shown by the few proficiency tests still permitted in elementary, middle, and high schools in Connecticut, and by their disgraceful racial performance gaps.
COWARDLY, UNACCOUNTABLE, PATHETIC: How much more does anyone really need to know about the corruption and incompetence of the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities System than something that was reported a week ago?
The system is still embroiled in the scandal over its departing chancellor, Terrence Cheng, who last year was caught abusing his expense account despite his annual compensation of nearly $500,000. The system's Board of Regents decided he had to go but feared that the contract the board had given him, which extended to next July, might be construed in court to prevent his dismissal. So it was agreed that he would leave the chancellorship on July 1 and become "strategic adviser" to the board for another year, doing amorphous stuff for the same compensation.
An interim chancellor, O. John Maduko, lately administrator of the community college system, has been appointed to serve for a year at a salary estimated at $425,000, not counting fringe benefits.
Fair questions remain about the college system's administration and state legislators continue to criticize it. So a week ago, the Hartford Courant asked for an interview with the chairman of the Board of Regents, Martin Guay. He refused.
How cowardly, unaccountable, and pathetic for the chairman of a major government agency.
Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, who appoints most of the regents, should be embarrassed.
Democratic state legislators should be embarrassed too. They should be emboldened to ask more critical questions of the regents and college administrators generally. Legislators could start with: Is it really impossible to hire a competent, public-spirited administrator for less than a half million dollars per year?
Chris Powell has written about Connecticut government and politics for many years (CPowell@cox.net).