(Rhyming table with table three times in a row and then escalating to level is my favorite poetic move anyone ever did. Knock you over)

Fuck William Zantzinger

Oh I would say this differently, that “material interests” literally means (and only means) relationships with other humans. Socializing and organizing are synonyms. (Thrilled about the cookie swap.)

Yesterday, our union was proud to join public higher ed workers across PA. Our coalition is unprecedented and growing. Community college and PASSHE, and Pitt, Temple and Penn State workers are calling on Harrisburg to fully fund public higher ed. Let’s go from the bottom 10 to the top 10.

Imagine thinking bob dylan has your best interests at heart

Murder Most Foul (song) - Wikipedia

I am reading the Wikipedia page for “murder most foul” (rel. 3/26/2020) and all the criticism is about it being about healing and coming together but jfc ppl it was *clearly* a curse Dylan was putting on us to stop history from inflecting and keeping us in c20

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_...

(I’m watching ER and mourning)

What if the standard history of the last three decades of television had Julianna Margulies as a (the) central figure. This is so obviously correct it makes me despair that it is not even on the table.

I don’t know who to talk to about the thing where everyone is so stupid

Reddit thread about golden age of television with no search results for the good wife lol

I see. Thanks

Are future years of multi year awards paid for out of the current year agency budget? I thought that they were commitments of future budgets.

Jean Smart on Hacks is the best television since Jame the Virgin

Love Mary Balogh

Good story otherwise!

"This will impact our entire community. Everyone in Western Pennsylvania has some connection to Pitt," said Tyler Bickford, head of the United Steelworkers union that represents 35 faculty members at Pitt.

@ryandeto.bsky.social 3500!

I agree with this with the caveat that for many people "business as usual" means defying their supervisors and directives from agencies to continue doing work that is supposedly now prohibited; I think for a lot of people the default is to stop doing a lot of good things they were doing.

I just think the argument that (quasi-)endowments are only for the future is taking a side in a political disagreement about institutional priorities; it is not a neutral technocratic description. It's a reasonable position to hold, but it is often presented as a fact rather than a position.

the liquidity point is fair, but it is also fair to argue that universities should rebalance some of their holdings into more liquid assets. It is a mistake to think of endowments as a "rainy day fund," but it also would not be crazy for these orgs to use some of these assets as rainy day funds!

thank you!

Right, but the "has to" is usually designated by the board, rather than an external donor/contract. So it's not legally binding. It may be prudent! It definitely should not be spent to replace funding that the government should be providing. (It should be spent on students and employees 🙃)

it's always buried somewhere in their audited financial statements, either as "unrestricted" or "quasi endowment." I agree it's only 25% and does not solve this problem, and I also strongly agree that the feds need to fully fund research regardless of whether big universities should hoard less cash

I strongly believe this is a separate question from whether the feds should fully fund research--even if we should spend more of "endowments" on operating expenses, that is not any sort of argument for reducing government support for research and higher education. But we should still be accurate

back on my bullshit!

it is just important that large portions of what many universities call "endowments" are in fact unrestricted, and it is fair for people to argue over how those funds are used. The story that endowments are restricted by donor agreements is only partially true, and it is misleading.

most big endowments have huge, often majority, components that are unrestricted

Also gifts that are restricted to "financial aid" pass through and become tuition, which is unrestricted general revenue. It is a nice way for fundraisers to raise effectively unrestricted revenues while still telling faculty/staff they can't spend the money bc it wld take from students

I agree it is not straightforward to just fix this with endowments, but this is not quite right. "Distributions" are different than restrictions. At UMich $5.6 billion is unrestricted.

2024.annualreport.umich.edu/uploads/fy24...

The first form of cost sharing concerns the un-recovery of F&A by institutions of higher education despite them having Federally-negotiated F&A rates. In FY15, the latest year for which data are available [27], U.S. colleges and universities did not recover $4.86 billion in F&A'3 of the $68.7 billion in total funding expended'* (a ratio of 7%), '5 compared to $11.1 billion of F&A recovered. In other words, these institutions did not recover 30% of the F&A they were allowed to receive owing to their negotiated rates. For public institutions, the un-recovery was 34.7% while it was 23.9% for private institutions [27]. At my own university's Norman campus, un-recovered F&A averaged $17.5 million per year from FY11 through FY15, with the ratio of unrecovered to total F&A recovery averaging 48% [6], or well above the national average. Viewed another way, the current Norman campus approved F&A rate is 55%, while the actual recovery rate on funded research awards is 33%. As a result, the university spends 22 cents of its own money to obtain $1 in grant or contract funds. Although actual recovery rates are not systematically compared to approved rates, the general belief in the community is that a 20 percentage point differential is not uncommon |28].