My old school

Leo Botstein has been, among many other things, president of Bard College for the past four decades. This profile, published in the New Yorker a couple of years ago, describes Botstein as being extremely good at raising money but even better at spending it:

Botstein has built Bard in his own polymath image. (In addition to his duties as president, he is a historian and a busy orchestral conductor; he has led the American Symphony Orchestra for more than twenty years.) He is celebrated for his grand schemes and the rich donors they attract. Though he has raised more than a billion dollars during his tenure, the college’s finances remain precarious. Bard has lacked both a large body of wealthy alumni and a developed infrastructure for soliciting their donations. One of Botstein’s daughters has joked that he should consider renting out the campus for weddings in the summer. “There are lots of very good things going for Bard,” David Schwab, a chairman emeritus of the board of trustees, told me. “Money is not one of them.”

Where is all that money going? From a 2014 piece:

Moody’s Investors Service recently downgraded Bard’s bond rating three notches, a sign of what the firm sees as long-term risks. Its analysts also raised delicate but larger questions about Bard’s future without Botstein, who said he’s not going anywhere, and his longtime chief financial officer.

Bard, located about 100 miles outside of Manhattan, is unusual among colleges. It operates its undergraduate program largely without an endowment and plows much of its money – from donors and tuition – into educational and cultural offerings in five states and five countries.

Botstein, who has led Bard since 1975, dismissed Moody’s criticism and called questions about Bard’s finances a “terrible distraction.”

“When you have bond raters peering over your life’s work, it’s like hanging a painting in front of semi-blind people,” he said. “You could be in real trouble.”

Botstein – a world class fund-raiser and Renaissance man – has expanded Bard and its mission. There’s a top-notch conservatory building, college campuses in Eastern Europe and on the West Bank and partnerships with public school systems in New York and New Orleans.

These are expensive projects, often with little revenue generating potential. But Botstein would rather spend what money he has on education than squirrel it away, unused. He said Bard is an “educational cause” rather than “some retirement portfolio’s safe pension investment.”

Anyway, our renaissance polymath has now turned his attention to American higher education as a whole, with a piece in Money magazine that argues the government should simply forgive all $1.3 trillion in outstanding federal student loan debt, and then set up a loan forgiveness program for new borrowers:

Once having wiped out existing debt—as an investment in our nation’s human capital—we need a new loan program for current and future students. It should include a structured forgiveness provision. As an incentive to recruit our best talent into public service, loan holders who work in key public sector fields, from teaching to law enforcement, should receive a forgiveness benefit. After 20 years of being a public school teacher, for example, one’s debt should be marked down to zero.

This is such a brilliant and paradigm-shattering idea that President/Maestro/Prof. Botstein will be excited to learn that somebody has already thought of it: specifically, the United States federal government, which actually instituted a much more generous version of Botstein’s proposal, featuring complete forgiveness after ten years rather than 20, back in 2007.

Reminder: this guy has been president of a kind of famous American institution of higher learning for 41 years. In other words, he’s not opining on whether Ted Williams was a better hitter than Babe Ruth, or whether it’s acceptable to make a Martini with vodka. You would think the basic finances of American higher education would be right in his professional wheelhouse — or at least that he would have a worshipful flunky or three Google the subject before casting his analytic pearls before swine.