Matt Yglesias

Do Political Science Departments Ignore Conservatism?

Peter Berkowitz offers some old whine in a slightly new bottle:

The political science departments at elite private universities such as Harvard and Yale, at leading small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore and Williams, and at distinguished large public universities like the University of Maryland and the University of California, Berkeley, offer undergraduates a variety of courses on a range of topics. But one topic the undergraduates at these institutions — and at the vast majority of other universities and colleges — are unlikely to find covered is conservatism. [...]

But most students will hear next to nothing about the conservative tradition in American politics that stretches from John Adams to Theodore Roosevelt to William F. Buckley Jr. to Milton Friedman to Ronald Reagan. This tradition emphasizes moral and intellectual excellence, worries that democratic practices and egalitarian norms will threaten individual liberty, attends to the claims of religion and the role it can play in educating citizens for liberty, and provides both a vigorous defense of free-market capitalism and a powerful critique of capitalism’s relentless overturning of established ways.

Since Berkowitz specifically calls out Harvard, and since I went there and no how to navigate its course catalogue, I thought I’d look into this.

In the coming year, the Harvard Government (i.e., political science) department is offering exactly six courses on “Political Thought and Its History.” Two of the six courses (Gov 1060 “Ancient and Medieval Political Philosophy” and Gov 1061 “The History of Modern Political Philosophy”) are taught by Harvey Mansfield and so I trust the right won’t be slighted in his presentation. One is Eric Nelson’s Gov 1074 “Political Thought of the American Founding” which name checks John Adams in its three-sentence course description. There’s also Gov 1094 “The Jewish Political Tradition,” Gov 1092 “The Past and Future of the Left,” and finally Gov 1072 “Moral Issues in Contemporary Politics” which promises to “weigh both sides of arguments over such issues as economic redistribution, the rights of women and racial minorities, the political status of the family, the regulation of the beginning and end of life, and the conduct of foreign policy.” That doesn’t seem to me as if conservative thought is being ignored. Now you could fairly say that Harvard simply isn’t offering an especially large quantity of courses on the history of political thought in general but that’d be a very different complaint.

Meanwhile, the course with the most students and the most direct policy relevance is the introductory economics course that was taught by economist and Republican Party operative Martin Feldstein in my day and is currently taught by economist and Republican Party operative Greg Mankiw.

No doubt there is some college or university somewhere for which Berkowitz’s complaint is valid, but he specifically cited Harvard as an example and it doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. My initial impulse on reading his article was to crack a joke about how people don’t study conservative ideas because conservative ideas are of such low quality. I’ll restrain myself from saying that, but suffice it to say that the research methods and evidentiary standards being employed by Berkowitz and the WSJ op-ed page don’t exactly make a strong case for inculcating young people with the conservative approach.

HMC FAIL

When I was in college, people used to joke about Harvard being a gigantic hedge fund that just happened to run a university as a sideline. These days, the university still has its faculty, its students, and (most importantly of all) its reputation, but the hedge fund seems to have run into a ton of trouble. It’s not only—or even especially—that they’ve lost money in the downturn. Rather, the crux of the matter is that some of their more exotic investments seem to have got them stuck in a nasty liquidity squeeze that’s forcing budget cuts.

Felix Salmon remarks:

And maybe Harvard’s alumni might start giving a lot more now than they have in the past. After all, until recently, any giving from alumni was dwarfed by the investment gains of the endowment, and so the incentive to add another drop to the bucket was greatly reduced. Now, by contrast, cash from alumni is desperately needed to meet the university’s annual liquidity requirements. It might even feel better, giving money when you know it’s going to actually be spent, rather than giving money simply to augment some gargantuan endowment.

My advice to my fellow alumni would be: Don’t.

If you want to give money to an educational institution, do some research and find a charter school in your metropolitan area that’s obtaining good results with a demographically unfavorable group of kids. Or find help our a regional public college of little repute that provides valuable educational services and could really use the money. Sure, if your checkbook is fat enough to finance a research endeavor that could make a major contribution to discovering an HIV vaccine or something it might make sense to invest in a world-famous university. But as a general matter, fancy schools that are already rich and famous and overwhelming serve students from privileged backgrounds are not a good target of charitable giving.

Endownment

I remember when I was at Harvard hearing a lot about how the endowment there wasn’t just big, it was exceedingly well-managed. You know, by people so smart they impressed Harvard smartypantses with their smarts. But not smart enough to dodge a downturn, it seems:

Harvard officials say the university’s largest-in-the-nation endowment lost about 22 percent of its value, or $8 billion, in the four months since the end of the last fiscal year. [...] They say the university should plan for a 30 percent drop in endowment value by the end of next June.

[Executive Vice President Edward] Forst tells The Harvard Crimson student newspaper that the 22 percent estimate may be conservative because some university money is handled by external managers that have yet to report figures.

Of course a 30 percent loss isn’t actually so bad given the current market climate, especially if the university really did get larger-than-normal returns during the upswing years. So maybe these guys really do know what they’re doing.

Meanwhile, giving money to wealthy elite universities still doesn’t make much sense. If you want to donate to something in the educational field, find a small, un-famous school that seems to be doing a decent job and could really put money to good use and help them out. Or find a local charter school (or my friend Komal’s school in Boston) that’s getting good results with disadvantaged kids and help them.

Out of Town News

Speaking of smoking, the confidence in the economy of America’s elite is sure to be shattered by the news that Out of Town News, the newstand smack in the middle of Harvard Square, is shutting down. The internet had basically made its core business model obsolete some time ago. The general idea, as witnessed by the name, was that you could buy all kinds of “out of town” publications there, thus serving the news needs of the university’s geographically diverse community. But people still buy other stuff — I used to buy cigarettes there, and sometimes Diet Coke (but soda’s cheaper at the university vending machine), but I think cigarette retailing is a declining industry as well.

Note that the closing of Out of Town News is part of the dystopian vision of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Endowments Down

Catching up on stuff I’d been ignoring, I see Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust sent a letter to the community on a subject I’d been wondering about — what’s happened to all these university endowments:

Consider, first, the endowment. As a result of strong returns and the generosity of our alumni and friends, endowment income has come to fund more than a third of the University’s annual operating budget. Our investments have often outperformed familiar market indexes, thanks to skillful management and broad diversification across asset classes. But given the breadth and the depth of the present downturn, even well-diversified portfolios are experiencing major losses. Moody’s, a leading financial research and ratings service, recently projected a 30 percent decline in the value of college and university endowments in the current fiscal year. While we can hope that markets will improve, we need to be prepared to absorb unprecedented endowment losses and plan for a period of greater financial constraint.

She doesn’t include any specific details, but it’s strange to toss that “30 percent decline” figure out there without saying anything further. You would think that if they’ve lost less than 30 percent they would say so.