Harvards War With Trump Forces Question of How Endowments Should Be Spent

Among Harvard University’s many distinctions remains the fact it is the oldest continuing corporation in the Western Hemisphere.The designation originates in a charter, authorizing a board of officers to oversee the college’s finances, property and receipt of gifts.

Nearing his death in 1638, John Harvard, a Puritan minister, left half his estate to the institution that would soon bear his name.Five years later came a contribution of 100 pounds from Ann Radcliffe to underwrite Harvard’s first scholarships.

The university’s funds, as the historian Bruce Kimball has noted, are the oldest perpetual investments in the United States.At $53.2 billion, Harvard’s endowment is the largest in the world, with more than 70 percent of its portfolio given over to interests in hedge funds and private equity.The endowment does not include its real estate, which encompasses acres of land across the river in Boston, parcels of which the university purchased for $88 million over several years in the 1990s, anonymously to avoid the possibility of paying more.

In 2023, the university’s chief investment officer, a title absent from any 17th-century charter, made $7.6 million.These figures can breed confusion, if not hostility, among the many people whose lives will never be touched by Massachusetts Hall.The Trump administration’s war against higher education for what it insists is a dangerous culture of intellectual inflexibility has forced a debate about capital as central now as the vast underlying disagreements over values.

The endowment of the University of Pennsylvania, to take one example, stands at three and a half times the municipal budget of Philadelphia.If universities can claim assets like this, it can be hard to understand what keeps them from releasing funds to cover the research dollars the government is taking away in the name of eradicating “wokeness.”Unlike Columbia, which bowed to the White House, Harvard resisted.

In retaliation, the government ...