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Investor Who Pushed for Harvard President’s Exit Sees His Wife Accused of Plagiarism
(www.nytimes.com)
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Why was an investor pushing for anything regarding academia? Who listened and why did they act on it? So much of this doesn't make sense.
Because universities are businesses with shareholders?
No. They aren't... Not at all.
They shouldn't be, but in practice, they are.
They don't. Not typically, anyway. A private university may have a list of donors (and some donors may get specific buildings named after them) and a Board of Trustees, but the two aren't related.
Harvard is structured as a non-profit, as it happens. There's a lot to say about how the system is so corrupt most non-profits are rigged as means to funnel operating expenses to the C-level types, but, in theory, non-profit, no shareholders to be beholden to.
For-profit universities do exist, but tend towards the Trump University scale of education.
My experience is of the UK higher education system, but from what I've seen, deeply embedded neoliberal ideology is prevalent across many universities.
What this means in practice is an excess of metrics, and steadily increasing bureaucracy. Whether the university has a hundred million pound endowment or it's one of the "poorer" ones, I see the same insidious patterns.