Chronicle : The pandemic reveals ineptitude at the top
How does a university with a $6-billion endowment and $10 billion in assets suddenly find itself in a solvency crisis? How is one of the country’s top research universities reduced, just a month after moving classes online, to freezing its employees’ retirement accounts?
But a university is not a corporation that must maximize its profitability for the next quarterly earnings call. It is, or should be, an institution with far longer time horizons. Johns Hopkins has weathered two world wars, a Great Depression, a global flu pandemic, and multiple economic crashes, the last barely a decade old. Some American universities are older than the nation itself. These institutions exist for the long term.