Capitalism and the constant thirst for growth is killing society. Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth?
> Since when did universities care almost solely about renevnue and growth?
Since endowments got huge.
Could you explain this more? At first glace, a large endowment should either free you from worrying about revenue or move your focus to managing an endowment with a school as a side hustle.
> a large endowment should either free you
A large endowment attracts greedy people who then want to make it larger, that is true regardless where you go.
A large endowment requires more management, so you bring in a finance department to manage it. With what metric are those employees going to be evaluated, given that there is always going to be someone who will want the stability of a government job? It's not going to be "just maintain, don't worry". It's going to be "who can get us the most ROI?".
That’s a magnifier but it shouldn’t be the cause; for that you need a shift in management culture from optimizing for academic missions to optimizing for careers/influence of management and trustees.
Large endowments causes that unless you have very strict rules around it like the Nobel prize endowment. You can see how every large charity starts to focus on growing larger rather than its mission, Mozilla is a good example of that.
I see a correlation in some orgs, but can you explain the mechanics? I think I’ve also seen cases where the original mission continues to be the primary compass, so maybe the mechanics of the failure mode are what I don’t have a clear picture of yet.
With the us government now going after their funding they may have to start caring even more
When it was generally accepted by our society that the goal of all work is victory, not success. Capitalism frames everything as a competition, even when collaboration is obviously superior. Copyright makes this an explicit rule.