Endowment Declines 27% in 2008
Last February, the Cornell University endowment was valued at $5.4B; now the endowment has shrunk by 27% from its June ‘08 highs to just $4.5B according to the Cornell Daily Sun. There’s still no official quarterly financial report on the Investment Office’s endowment page, so we take these figures with a grain of salt.
The decline follows a broad sell-off in equity markets, and tracks well with similar declines at Harvard (25%), Yale (25%), and Columbia (22%). Dartmouth appears to have missed the bullet, posting a market-beating 6% loss. CU President Skorton, in an interview with Bloomberg, outlines cost-cutting measures designed to help Cornell through this financial crisis:
We’re throttling back our expenditures. We’re going to need a 10 percent correction in our budget in the next three to five years.
This does not include potential future losses from “hard to value” assets in “real estate and private equity” which account for a third of the fund. See also Meta Ezra and the Cornell alumni magazine for more endowment reporting.
Cornell Sun Pays For Vacation For Four to China
The Cornell Sun has just paid for four of its members to go on a 10-day vacation in China. The lucky ones are Rebecca Shoval, Jonny Lieberman, Matt Hintsa, and Rebecca Weiss according to posts in the The Sun In China category. I’m horribly jealous; I want a paid China vacation, too!
A view of their current homepage
To send four people to China would cost quite a bit. Per person, the expenses break down to roughly:
- $1000 for the flight
- $150 per night at a hotel
- $100 per day for food / siteseeing
The grand total for the Sun trip is then probably in the range of 4 * $1000 + 4 * 10 * $250 = $14,000. Granted it’s not a lot of money, but until now I wasn’t aware they were profitable, let alone banking it! Oh whoops, I lied. They had help, according to this Special Thanks story:
Special thanks to Mao Ye grad and Shawn Kong grad for helping to organize this trip; Pei Zhu ‘11 and Yun Yun Cai ‘11 for acting as translators and tour guides; The Sun Alumni Association for helping support the trip; Shanghai Publishing Museum, Guangming Daily, China Campus, Youth Renmin…
It sounds like the trip was a great deal of fun, but for the Sun, not a lot of success. So far all they have to show for it is a handful of brief blog-style entries of a few hundred words describing things about China which are already pretty well know if you were to stretch your finger and read a real blog about China, like Shanghaiist or ESWN.
Anti-Muslim Posters at GWU cause Agony, not Satire
According to an article in the Washington Post, Muslim students at George Washington University blanketed the campus with “offensive posters” that shocked with a “gigantic headline:”
“I was just really shocked that this sort of hatred exists on our campus,” said Najah El Bash, a sophomore from New York who is one of the leaders of the GWU Muslim Students Association. “You never think this would come so close to home, from people you’re in classes with. . . . It’s scary.” It had to be well-planned, she said, for so many posters to go up so quickly
The image, which was intended to satire the current American sentiment towards Islam and Muslims, clearly failed to achieve its intended effect. The blog Little Green Footballs reproduces an article detailing the general GWU reaction:
Representatives from more than a dozen groups on campus and from Muslim, Catholic and Jewish faiths spoke in unison condemning the posters and the unidentified subjects who hung them.
“We wish to reaffirm our solidarity with all our brothers and sisters of all faith backgrounds and reiterate our commitment to greater understanding of all peoples, of all creeds and denominations,” said sophomore Brandon Hines, in a statement from the GW Catholic community.
It’s unfortunate that the poster was misinterpreted as “hate speech” by the GWU community. Instead of thinking about why an negative American attitude towards Islam might exist, or how American and Islamic cultures can work together, the dunces at GWU stuck their fingers in their ears and shouted “I can’t hear you!” Maybe we should organize a GWU-wide field trip to a NYC comedy club to teach them the difference between racially motivated satire and hate crime.
