One of the interesting subjects that is kept under wraps is this: top colleges have had their admissions and alumni offices get together to carefully model what kind of high school applicants are likely to donate the most money to their alma maters in the long run. But, that information is treated like the President's nuclear football, so I can only guess based on anecdotal information about huge donors.
As far as I can tell from reading articles about 9-digit donors is that a one word description for many of the really big donors is jock: white, male, straight, athletic, competitive, fraternity-joining, and pretty conservative.
To be a big donor it also helps to have legacy ties to the college: either your parents or your children should go to the college.
For example, I first got interested in this subject reading about the first $100 million donor to USC. He was the shotputter on the USC track team, son of two USC grads, then started a steel fabrication company in Fresno.
For example, today we learn:
Billionaire Silicon Valley real estate developer John Arrillaga recently wrote Stanford University a $150 million check—the single largest donation from a living individual in the school’s history.
Arrillaga’s 9-figure donation is the latest in a long line of donations to the school, which began with a 2-figure donation shortly after he graduated in 1960, according to a letter published today from Arrillaga’s daughter, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.
She's the wife of Netscape web browser developer Marc Andreesen.
Arrillaga, now 76, grew up in poor in the Los Angeles suburb of Inglewood and arrived at Stanford in 1955 on a basketball scholarship. He worked six jobs in college to pay for living expenses, his daughter wrote.
The name "Arrillaga" is of Basque origin from the Franco-Spanish border region. If Basques are Hispanic, then he is one of three Hispanics on the Forbes 400, along with a Miami Cuban real estate developer and Arte Moreno, the billboard king who is a genuine Mexican-American.
The Arrillaga name graces eight buildings at Stanford—the Arrillaga Alumni Center, the Arrillaga Center for Sports and Recreation, the Arrillaga Dining Service Building, the Arrillaga Family Dining Commons, the Arrillaga Family Sports Center, the Arrillaga Gymnasium and Weight Room, the Arrillaga Outdoor Education and Recreation Center and the Arrillaga Plaza.
These are not, you'll notice, the most highbrow buildings at Stanford. A lot of vast fortunes have been made by Stanford grads in all sorts of esoteric ways, but Arrillaga's billions have come in just about the lowest tech field: real estate development. This is not uncommon that the biggest donations often come from the alumni in the more regular guy fields.
... In 2006, Arrillaga made a $100 million donation to the school, which at the time was the single largest individual donation ever made to Stanford. In Nov. 2011, Dorothy and Robert King (who coincidentally also graduated from Stanford in 1960) topped that donation by writing the school a $150 million check.
Or, perhaps it's not a coincidence, at least not in Arrillaga's mind, that the two classmates have been competing to give the most humongous donation in Stanford history.
The Wall Street Journal reports Arrillaga’s most recent donation was slightly bigger than the Kings’ donation, edging them out to reclaim the top donor spot.
Can't stop competing, can he?
Athletics pays off for some colleges in donations. Laura Arrillaga-Andreesen writes:
Athletics creates strong family bonds. My father attended every basketball game, tennis match and softball or baseball game in which my brother, John Jr., and I played as kids. Today, he rarely misses a Stanford home basketball or football game ...
If you are wondering why Stanford is so good in football recently, it has a lot to do with its new facilities, which attract top athletes. Many of the buildings were paid for by Arrillaga:
As part of making his first nine-figure gift to Stanford, he led the construction of the university's state-of-the-art football stadium – completed under-budget and in just 42 weeks' time. He made high-level decisions on stadium design and landscaping while paying attention to detail, overseeing 24-hour construction crews, picking out every tree, selecting seat materials and tasting countless hot dogs before choosing which brand to serve.
Arrillaga is also a fraternity boy, Delta Tau Delta.
And he married a Stanford girl. His daughter Laura has four separate degrees from Stanford:
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, BA '92, MBA '97, MA '98, MA '99, is a lecturer in philanthropy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a lecturer in public policy at Stanford, and founder and chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
This legacy thing has worked out well for Stanford:
In fact, my father's philanthropy was a primary inspiration behind the $27.5 million my husband, Marc Andreessen, and I gave to Stanford Hospital in 2006 to fund a new Emergency Department.
In general, it appears that the biggest donors to colleges are conservatives.
I can't even imagine donating money to a college (other than the small fortune I've paid for my kids' "education").
ReplyDeleteIf I had spare shekels, that's just about the last place they would go.
Captcha: 1270 Assolli
Huh, assolli!
Marc Andreessen is now a major venture capitalist, a founding partner of Andreesen Horowitz. I don't know much about his politics, but at least neither he nor his partner Horowitz appear among the list of FWD.us supporters.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Harvard Yale no athletics there and uber lib.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey
The Basques have fought decades long war with Spain because they did not want to be called Hispanic
ReplyDelete"The Arrillaga name graces eight buildings at Stanford..."
ReplyDeleteI've always found it annoyingly egotistical when families splatter their names on every building in sight. At the University of Utah, the Eccles family (descendants of the founders of First Security Bank) have put their name on just about everything, even though most of the money seems to come from one place: a foundation established by one of the childless branches of the family, George and Dolores Eccles.
Stick with one or two big things on campus: a school, a major building, and leave well enough alone. If you want more name recognition, you're probably better off spreading your wealth to different schools and/or causes.
Conservatives contributing money to institutions of leftist indoctrination.
ReplyDeleteWords cannot describe it.
Sounds shady...
ReplyDeleteIt's easier for Arrillaga to make the larger donation because he knows he'll get the building contracts.
The largest donor to a college is Michael Bloomberg, who has given $1.1 billion to John Hopkins, and had the good taste to keep his huge donations secret for decades, unlike the gentile Stanford guy who demanded his name be slapped on a dozen different buildings.
ReplyDeleteThe 2nd largest college donor is Gordon Moore, who gave $600 million to Cal Tech then another $200 million jointly to Cal Tech and UC Berkeley.
The largest donor to any medical school, or to anything in the UC system, was gay jew David Geffen's $300 million to UCLA Medical School.
In this list of donors to the University of Michigan, #2, 3, 4 and 5 are all Jewish
http://www.annarbor.com/news/u-m-donations-top-10/
In conclusion, you should accept entrepreneurial nerds and Jews to your college.
Anyway, I doubt schools are as far-sighted as you think. Big donations usually come in when the donors are 55+ years old. When you are looking at 17-year-old applicants, this means all the university's high-level staff will be long retired if not dead by the time any such strategic acceptances come in.
JohnS Hopkins, for chrissakes.
DeleteSteve, did you read lawblogger Steve Clowney's* essay about his two years as a Princeton admissions officer a few years back? I think you would find it interesting, and he writes about the school's efforts to find parents who might donate if their children were recruited...
ReplyDeletehttp://lawprofessors.typepad.com/property/2013/06/some-non-property-thoughts-on-fisher.html
*Yes, his real name, not a feeble insult.
Well documented that jews donate more money than wasps, as a percentage of income and percentage of wealth
ReplyDelete"I've always found it annoyingly egotistical when families splatter their names on every building in sight."
ReplyDeleteBy all means have one or even 3 buildings named after yourself, they have to be called something. Why not a lab, dorm, and gym? Beyond that is just awful taste.
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer kept it classy by donating $20 million to Harvard for a new comp-sci building, but gave it their mother's maiden names, thus honoring their maternal grandfathers.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/10.14/dworkin.html
Also, it seems like Steve's beloved jock-donors focus their giving on stadiums and fancy athletic training facilities that a typical student can't even use. Setting up a minor-league sports team on a university campus with university branding is I suppose better than leaving the money to your dogs or drug-addled children heirs.
Considering that I have given jack shit to my alma mater, I guess HYPS was right to turn me down.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteOf course conservatives - or should I say, "conservatives" - donate to colleges to indoctrinate their future Diversity Commissars of Human Resources, so that the huge corporations the "conservatives" own can Import Third World unskilled & semi-skilled scab labor and so they can get away with retaining "American" law firms to advise them on how not to hire Americans so they can H-1B visa-scam hire foreign scab labor.
Big firms learned very quickly how to use the Left's useful idiots and Multi-Culti-Diversity codes to get away with not hiring Americans so they could Import Third World cheap labor and undercut and destroy the U.S. middle class. This just forms another prong of the "privatize profits, socialize costs" war the globalist rich have been waging on American workers.
"Well documented that jews donate more money than wasps, as a percentage of income and percentage of wealth."
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but it's a helluva lot easier donating to typically leftist institutions when you're a lefty yourself. If I had a billion or more to spread around my biggest hurdle would be finding an institution that wouldn't use my money to undermine my beliefs. Even institutions which are nominally conservative tend to get pulled to the left over time.
I read Clowney's article. It is dishonest.
ReplyDeleteHe says *most* of the the black Princeton admissions would have been accepted without affirmative action on a meritocratic system. In fact, at the HYPS level, the number is over 90% of black students needing AA.
We see this in the both AA-free Cal Tech admissions, which is 0% black, as well as Berkeley's admissions right after AA was banned, but before the admins figured out how to evade the law, which was about 1% black.
Any admissions process without AA that includes a strong IQ-type test is going to have under 1% blacks at the highest level.
The depressing fact is that one out of 750 whites have IQ>145, but the number for blacks is about 1 in 31,600. But 1 in 750 isn't even that elite. A large suburban public high school in Iowa will have someone that smart in its graduating class most years.
One in 4300 whites has IQ>152.5. The number for blacks is 1 in 294,000, in other words most years there will be one or two blacks with an IQ that high who graduates from high school in the entire USA, compared with hundreds of whites and asians.
The 2nd largest college donor is Gordon Moore, who gave $600 million to Cal Tech then another $200 million jointly to Cal Tech and UC Berkeley.
ReplyDeleteShouldnt his donations double every 18 months or so?
I originally agreed to donate to my UC on one condition: that I got a job fairly quickly with my degree. The degree turned out to be pretty useless, so I didn't donate a dime.
ReplyDeleteOT: In " alpha male and the women who love them" news.
ReplyDeleteI have always suspected that the top tier schools are very worried that all of their high achieving Korea, Chinese, and Indian students and alumni will never become donors. UCLA has been fairly open in worrying that all of the Asian students will not care about UCLA once they graduate.
ReplyDeleteWhen the most successful ones are working in ethnicity-organized businesses, I doubt if there is any capacity left to left to help the old alma mater.
A rule in Cambridge is that you can expect more in donations per head from former undergraduates than from former research students because too many of the latter go on to careers as acdemics and therefore never have any money to speak of.
ReplyDelete"Anyway, I doubt schools are as far-sighted as you think. Big donations usually come in when the donors are 55+ years old. When you are looking at 17-year-old applicants, this means all the university's high-level staff will be long retired if not dead by the time any such strategic acceptances come in."
ReplyDeleteUniversities seem to be able to think on a long time scale, perhaps because Harvard is one of the few things I can think of that will probably be around in 2060. The directional states ('Eastern North Dakota'), as Half Sigma calls them, not so much.
Probably most big money makers are ex-jocks. There's a whole bunch of nerds who got rich thanks to the technology boom and are now able to donate money.
As for the yids--come on. They're obsessed with school, and have been since the fall of the second temple. I'd like to claim it's part of their conspiracy, but even the black-hats in Israel are obsessed with Torah study.
My very anecdotal experience is that Indian-Americans are big alms-givers to schools, East Asians not so much. The top universities have studied this closely, but it's all kept top secret.
ReplyDeleteWe've been astonished by Mr. John Arrillaga's $150 million donation and devoted a lengthy article.
ReplyDeleteFollowed by this one.
And this one, too.
And for good measure...
jk
nominally conservative tend to get pulled to the left over time.
ReplyDeletepulled is right... sued, forced or hostily taken over - Could you imagine how Henry Ford would react to how his money is used today?
Interesting Andressen gives his money to Stanford and not Illinois - i wonder how much 'drift' is like this happens - as the Sillcon valley is filled with U of Ill EE's .
In the 90's they got tons of $$ from beekman
Well documented that jews donate more money than wasps,
ReplyDeleteto what? self serving organizations that promote their in-group's advancement.. that's not a donation, its a tax deductable in group investment.
wasps tend to give their money to 'real' universalist causes that in many cases hurt wasps
I didn't see anything to indicate these people are conservative, unless "rich white jock" automatically makes you one.
ReplyDeleteHis daughter is good looking but doesn't appear to have any children. So I guess their billions go to charity ultimately.
ReplyDeleteJews are the big money givers in the Ivy League. That's why the presidents of these schools are mostly Jewish.
Do they not make toilets that can handle $150M? Perhaps not.
ReplyDeleteThere's a building at UC-Davis named for a certain St. Louis brewing and beer making family. Why was St. Louis's royalty so interested in Davis, California? Answer: Because they were trying to unload one of their relatively wayward family members on a far far far away from St. Louis school. If someone surname Anheuser or Busch or in-lawed to it or in-lawed out of it misbehaves anywhere near St. Louis, we hear about it.
ReplyDeleteA lousy investment, unless you have subpar children you want to graduate.
ReplyDeleteThey call it legacy; I call it nepotism and corruption.
Not too long ago I saw Charlie Rose interviewing Andreessen and Sheryl Sandberg on the future of Silicon Valley.
ReplyDeleteSandberg digressed at one point into the lack of women in Silicon Valley. She recalled how she dropped her pre-teen son off at a summer camp where children learn about computers, and there was only one -- ONE! -- girl there. She laughed and turned to the audience, expecting their approbation. Crickets. Andreessen looked like he wanted to pull out his smart phone and pretend to check his e-mail.
This doesn't make him conservative; he's probably more of a no-nonsense Silicon Valley-type. He's perspicacious enough to know that 10 year-old girls don't want to sit in computer labs during their summer break.
Half of the Basques live in France and seem happy not to be independent.
ReplyDeleteI worked for a few years in a relatively small Christian university's fundraising department while I went to school there. I logged a ton of donor contact reports while in this position so I got to see a lot of data about who the big shots were and how our people were going after them. It's not just the Stanfords and Michigans of the world that rely on football players for donations.
ReplyDeleteThe school was (is) in the process of transitioning from a right-wing institution that takes its religion seriously to a left-wing institution that happens to call itself Christian. One of the ironies is that it was an unspoken goal of everyone in the department to hide how it was our intention to stop being the university the donors went to in 1979. Most of the donors, I suspect, thought they were just building a better version of their good old alma mater.
If you're hellbent on donating to your alma mater, even one that was right-wing/Christian when you went there, do everything you can to follow it. It's a ridiculously safe bet it has moved leftward since you left, whether you graduated in 1970, 1990, or even 2010.
Conservatives are into Jock sports, Rush was terrible at sports but he finally made it on Jr Varsity in High School. In fact the jock sports usually produced the least conservatives since there are a lot of black football, basketball and boxers out there.
ReplyDeleteStanford had has a good swimming facility and during the 1990's won NCAA's swimming a lot.
ReplyDeleteAre Basques Hispanic? Very debatable. The Basque language is not Indo-European and apparently Basques have been genetically differentiated for at least 7,000 years.
ReplyDeleteOverall it would appear that Basques are separate ethnicity politically incorporated into Spain and France. Not very Hispanic either in the Spanish or New World senses of the word.
Based on genetic information, I appear to have Basque ancestors. However, there is no family history, genealogy, or even myths to explain the genetic data.
Jews don't control the Republican Party its the Koch brothers or the cheap labor evangelicals like Tom Delay who did things worst than Shelton Addison. Tom Delay was involved importing women to work in factories in Saipan and they also did sex work and this from an evangelical Christian.
ReplyDeleteConservatives are the biggest donors! WTF! To paraphrase Lenin: As the revolution approaches conservatives will be there to donate the rope.To paraphrase
ReplyDeleteSince Basque is a Cro-Magnon language, Arillaga ought to get some sort of affirmative action for native peoples.
ReplyDeleteAnon 10:17/Whiskey, Harvard fields 42 varsity sports teams.
ReplyDeleteThey fight fiercely.
One interesting question to followup on this observation that jocks are the most successful in business. What kind of jocks are most successful after college?
ReplyDelete-Those who play team sports and swimming rather individual sports.
-And I suspect mediocre jocks in their sport do best. Like you never ever hear about a college QB who didn't go pro making it big in business. Star jocks seem to lose ambition after college.
Whatever amount I feel free to disburse, beside to my three kids and two grandkids, I prefer to give to Mr. Sailer and J. Derbyshire. They need it more.
ReplyDelete-
My older son graduated and got his Ph.D. from Moscow University (Physics) “for free”.
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Our (with my wife) son and daughter were accepted to Caltech (with the interval 4 years); none went there. Son went to, and graduated from MIT (EECS), and got his Ph.D. from Stanford (computer science); daughter went to, and graduated from Cornell (Chemistry and Chem. Biology Dept.), and got her Ph.D. from U. California campus San Francisco (placenta research.) We paid full undergraduate tuition for both of them.
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I have no intent yet to give to Cornell, or to MIT, or to Stanford, or to UCSF, see above.
Asian donors that come to mind.
ReplyDeleteOscar Tang, an Andover alum, is the biggest donor to the school.
The engineering school at Columbia is named Fu after a Chinese donor.
The business school at Imperial was named after a Japanese American donor before his downfall.
The Basques have fought decades long war with Spain because they did not want to be called Hispanic
ReplyDeleteMy dear Doctor VN: I appreciate your insights into the Sub-Continent´s vast complexity, but your knowledge of the Basque Country seems to be null.
Basques have never fought Spain because there´s never been a independent entity called Basque Country with an army. You might refer to the left-wing terrorism waged by ETA, which is entirely different from war. ETA isn´t even a guerrila, which might count as war.
Ethnic Basques historicaly have either been subjects of Castille, then Spain (after the merger of Castille and Aragon), or of the kingdom of Navarre, formerly kindom of Pamplona.
Navarre was then absorbed by Spain and France. For the Anglosphere, Navarre is where Hemingway fell in love with Spain and bullfighting, in the city of Pamplona.
Some dinastic skirmishes were fought in the Middle Ages between Navarre and Castille, as well as against Aragon and France. But ethnic Basques in Navarre were neither the majority or even influential. Noblemen and merchants, as well as over half the peasantry spoke a form of Romance derived from Latin called Navarro-Aragonese, mutually intelligible with ancient Castillian. Today, most people in Navarre speak Spanish. The same is true of the Basque Country.
In the sense that Americans use the word "Hispanics", even the Spanish are not really Hispanic. "Hispanic" is a de facto racial designator meaning "American aboriginals".
ReplyDelete"What about Harvard Yale no athletics there and uber lib."
ReplyDeleteBoth schools are fairly strong in athletics, just not in football, the most visible sport. Yale is the 2013 NCAA Men's Hockey Champion, Harvard has fielded competitive NCAA basketball teams for quite awhile. Neither school is "uber lib", just normal US lib. Both schools generally reflect East Coast liberal establishment values and turn out plenty of future GOP voting I-Bankers and hedge fund managers year after year. I.e. the intellectual climate of Yale and Harvard is basically the same as the NYT or The New Yorker, but nowhere near as lefty as The Nation or Noam Chomsky. Stanford is certainly just as lefty as Yale.
Off topic but too good to miss
ReplyDeleteHillary Clinton out-polls Bush and Rubio among Hispanics for 2016.
In fact the jock sports usually produced the least conservatives since there are a lot of black football, basketball and boxers out there.
ReplyDeleteYes it is based along racial lines but since overall there are more white than black athletes in totality, the jocks donate and vote GOP.
The vast majority of white jock athletes tend to vote and donate GOP.
The vast majority of black jock athletes tend to vote and donate Dems.
OT: is this real? If so, how widely used was it?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/06/28/voting_rights_and_the_supreme_court_the_impossible_literacy_test_louisiana.html?wpisrc=most_viral
Universities seem to be able to think on a long time scale, perhaps because Harvard is one of the few things I can think of that will probably be around in 2060. The directional states ('Eastern North Dakota'), as Half Sigma calls them, not so much.
ReplyDeleteUhh, have you heard of this thing called fracking?
As of mid-2013, North Dakota is one of the few places in the world that I would NOT be betting against.
" The top universities have studied this closely, but it's all kept top secret."
ReplyDeleteI find fascinating the subject of the cabalistic knowledge residing withing prominent institutions serving as gatekeepers of the elite.
What must Harvard know, given its role, and its access to vast troves of information on the elite through various stages of life? What must the Educational Testing Service know of which it will never speak? What is their Big Data telling them that they cannot utter?
I remember Watson, immediately before being Watsoned, writing in his most recent book about a meeting with Derek Bok of Harvard,
"Rather than face up to facts that will likely change the way we look at ourselves, many persons of good will may see only harm in our looking too closely at individual genetic essences. So I was not surprised when Derek, who had spent most of our meeting listening, asked apprehensively how many years would pass before the key genes affecting differences in human intelligence would be found. My back-of-the-envelope answer of “15 years” meant that Summers’ then undetermined successor would not necessarily need to handle this very hot potato."
Why, one wonders, might Derek Bok have been so eager to get an answer to his question, and anxious about the answer? What was pulling at his thinking so hard that a ritual incantation of PC ideology couldn't seem to dispel his concern?
Some are waking up to the fact that the deck chairs have been rearranged on USS Diversity
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school I followed a certain university's basketball team because a friend's cousin was a second stringer on the basketball team. While this was a successful basketball team, it was not a big time team.
ReplyDeleteThe students were student athletes: many more English majors than PE majors on the team. And they graduated.
Decades later, I looked up the career paths of those basketball players. I was amazed at the number of high level business executives among the former players.
Conclusion: certain attributes which membership on school teams foster, such as teamwork,work ethic [hard to goof off and graduate if you are on a team],prioritizing time [ditto] decision making- are also helpful in the business world.
Alden, your comment saddened me. It touches on something that I have been wondering about. If you have time to add another comment, it would be interesting to hear who was behind the college transition that you describe.
ReplyDeleteObviously, the evolution of Christian universities into secular ones is nothing new, but how do schools reach the point at which their identities begin to change? At your institution, the donors weren't pushing the school in a new direction. Was it a new president? New members of the board?
It's a drastic change to go from being a serious religious college to a typical secular college, and yet there is no end to the schools that go through this metamorphosis. Who loses the will to maintain an institution's identity? Or is it that the old guard is simply steamrolled?
Unrelated, but you ought to do a commentary on this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nationalreview.com/corner/352559/cornel-west-blacks-being-pushed-back-bus-favor-gays-and-lesbians-will-allen
"Conclusion: certain attributes which membership on school teams foster, such as teamwork,work ethic [hard to goof off and graduate if you are on a team],prioritizing time [ditto] decision making- are also helpful in the business world. "
ReplyDeleteTallness helps too.
Well documented that jews donate more money than wasps,
ReplyDeleteYou need wealth to make donations. Steve has linked to some data on wealth, such as the Forbes wealthiest list. The data suggest a decline in the relative wealth of WASPs, and an increase in the relative wealth of Jews over the past half century.
Andressen met with Obama one on one and has been one of his biggest supporters as chronicled on his blog. If he is conservative Obama is the founder of Tea Party.
ReplyDeleteSteve, I think there is ample evidence to suggest you are completely wrong on this one.
ReplyDeleteYes, Universities **DO** want to maximize donations. However, they face an agency problem. This is the same one literary agencies and publishers and Hollywood faces.
Admissions officers tend to be most gay or female (or both!) and for the actual readers of applications young and female. And uber liberal, with a huge helping of hatred for straight White males and particularly the kind of straight White males who are successful later in life.
This is similar to the readers for Hollywood, literary agencies, and publishers who routinely ditch stuff that does make their lady parts tingle; i.e. jerky male bad boys and good girls who like to slum it up. Publishing, Hollywood, and most else faces the huge hurdle of entrenched prejudices and idiot beliefs by their line people who do what they want -- because there is no effective way to prevent them from doing so.
This was the model presented in Moneyball, with scouts wanting "good body" players regardless of actual ability, over-thrown by statistical modeling and disintermediation.
Colleges and Universities including Harvard face massive shortfalls in the future, because their admissions offices are filled with lunatic feminists who throw conservative White jock applications into the garbage can.
Echoing Epinshade and others finding that 4H, ROTC, and other markers of conservative, disciplined activities predict no admissions.
Here is the words of a typical line admissions officer, the one who in the above link read and rejected the admissions applications"
ReplyDelete"Like I said in my last post, I’m working in my school’s admissions office for the time being. This is a great opportunity for me, and I’m so glad to have the ability to decide who will come in and who won’t. We are here to make future leaders of America and the world, and as such we have the responsibility do keep those who would make the world a worse place far away, while admitting those who have potential to use their abilities to improve the world.
For instance I can’t tell you how many applications I saw that were just dripping with white male privelege. Any of those that I saw basically went straight to the garbage can regardless of how good their qualifactions were. If I saw an application from a white male that basically was just good test scores, and activities like chess club or math club or what not then it shows me this person is not interested in a diverse environment. Obviously he made no effort in integrating with minorities or to sympathize with them and is counting on male privelege to get in. So that kind of application should get ignored. In their place I admitted a female student. This goes double especially for math/science majors.
Another time this I had an application for what sounded like an arab male who wanted to study computer science. On paper he looked good enough, decent above average scores, and such. But I checked facebook and sure enough on his wall I came came upon a particularly hateful post about Israel supposedly not having a right to exist. I promptly trashed the application and sent out a rejection letter."
-----------------
There is no way for Universities to admit "good bets" to become successful, only legacies, because the only people able and willing and hired by Universities are hard-left gays and feminists, who toil through applications throwing out any that drip with "White male privilege" -- the kind of guy who thirty years later could have a successful real estate or services firm that throws off enough cash to donate $100 million.
So Harvard and Yale and the rest are down to kids of the elite, the Chelsea Clintons, the Obamas, in the hope that future oligarchs steer public funds their way (oligarchs NEVER dispense with THEIR money). For second or third tier schools it is even worse.
This is subprime all over again. Really, how will feminists/gays throwing out "White male privilege" applicants work out? These guys will go to Podunk State or increasingly online, feel zero to the place that rejected them, and start to throw their money around personally, with their own foundations.
Harvard has a lot money stored up from past donations, but the future flow looks increasingly shaky, and will require Oligarch influence to steer the public purse there -- setting off spoils fights with self-made guys who figure to blow the place up, fiscally. For places like say, Rice and Tulane and the rest, it is a rapid death sentence.
Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, BA '92, MBA '97, MA '98, MA '99, is a lecturer in philanthropy at Stanford Graduate School of Business, a lecturer in public policy at Stanford, and founder and chairman of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society.
ReplyDeleteLooks like his daughter gets to pretend she's living an independent life because of her father's donations.
Seriously, lecturer in philanthropy?
Another mega-donor is Sandy Weill, son of Polish Jews, whose lifetime Cornell contributions exceed $500 million. He also got super-nerd and fellow Jew Irwin Jacobs to kick in another $133 million to Cornell. Jacobs also has donated $125 million to UC-San Diego, $120 million to the San Diego Symphony, and $31 million to MIT.
ReplyDeleteAnd RKU thinks these schools accept too many Jews!
ReplyDeleteMy dear Doctor VN: I appreciate your insights into the Sub-Continent´s vast complexity,
DVN:Thank you much
but your knowledge of the Basque Country seems to be null.
DVN: Au contraire.I have been interested in Basques since I read that some scholars linked their isolated language with that of the Dravidians
Basques have never fought Spain because there´s never been a independent entity called Basque Country with an army. You might refer to the left-wing terrorism waged by ETA, which is entirely different from war. ETA isn´t even a guerrila, which might count as war."
DVN: Well if you have to be THAT pedantic. Sure its not a conventional war but certainly a rebellion against Spanish control of their territory
The Tamils,Irish and Kurds didnt exactly go to war in conventional manner against their respective oppressors in recent years but it was considered as such by the much beleagured populations.
Actually its interesting you bring up their left wing association.One of the tragedies of the cold war was that legitimate nationalistic movements were hijacked by leftists allied with either the Soviets or the Chinese and used a tool against Western interests.The sandinistas are an example most familiar to Americans.
I reminded of the scene in Spielbergs' Munich where the Palestnian has a conversation with the Mossad operative masquerading as Basque. The Palestinian (the PLO was also leftist) tells him that Palestinians do not care about the international revolution but only their blood and soil nationalism.
And of course why should they care? It is awfully tempting to use a readymade leftist framework with its weapons,cash,organization,PR machine,training et al
It is the choice between having a last decade computer where you have to create your software and operating system from the ground up and simply getting the latest macbook or PC with all the works for some quid pro quo
Basques in particular may have gone for the left leaning ideology because the right was associated with Franco(who disliked the Basques)
I am reminded of Mishima Yukio who (half)joked that he joined the right because there was no place for him on the left.
BB:Ethnic Basques historicaly have either been subjects of Castille, then Spain (after the merger of Castille and Aragon), or of the kingdom of Navarre, formerly kindom of Pamplona.
Navarre was then absorbed by Spain and France. For the Anglosphere, Navarre is where Hemingway fell in love with Spain and bullfighting, in the city of Pamplona.
Some dinastic skirmishes were fought in the Middle Ages between Navarre and Castille, as well as against Aragon and France. But ethnic Basques in Navarre were neither the majority or even influential. Noblemen and merchants, as well as over half the peasantry spoke a form of Romance derived from Latin called Navarro-Aragonese, mutually intelligible with ancient Castillian. Today, most people in Navarre speak Spanish. The same is true of the Basque Country.
DVN: Sure I never claimed that Basque beef with Spanish went back too far.
It is mostly a recent phenonema.
Indeed the kings of Castille had to swear an oath under an oak tree in Guernica to protect Basque freedoms.
Basques likely extracted similar pledges from Romans,Vandals and Moors
A good number of these colleges invest their endowments in alternative investment vehicles such as hedge funds. Oddly I havent heard of colleges losing a great deal of their monies in the 2008 crash.
ReplyDeleteIt would seem that they take great precaution and have good judgement in getting the best ROI
Heck many of the Ivy League endowments are larger than GDP of small countries!
If schools are trying to weigh in favor of taking on an alumni donor, and if as you say, alumni donors tend to be conservative white men, then why do they do everything possible to turn away conservative white men (fewer opportunities to get in, esp. if a conservative resume, fewer opportunities and assistance while they're there, open discrimination against them [which certainly had the effect on me of saying,"f*ck me if they're ever getting one red cent back from me"], and doing everything they can to try to ridicule and drive out conservatism). I'm quite sure white men do donate the most, but where is the evidence that the schools are trying to bring them in?
ReplyDelete""Well documented that jews donate more money than wasps, as a percentage of income and percentage of wealth."
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but it's a helluva lot easier donating to typically leftist institutions when you're a lefty yourself. If I had a billion or more to spread around my biggest hurdle would be finding an institution that wouldn't use my money to undermine my beliefs. Even institutions which are nominally conservative tend to get pulled to the left over time."
-Not to mention, when your paycheck contains a much higher pct. of disposable wealth. If you make $200k, its alot easier to donate to $50k to Columbia than it is for a guy making $40k living in the same city to donate $10k. And they guy donating $50k gets a bigger tax break percentagewise as well as some incentive.
"white, male, straight, athletic, competitive, fraternity-joining, and pretty conservative"
ReplyDeleteThey give so much to leftist organizations. What dummies. No wonder the Right is losing.
@Gringo
ReplyDeleteNice rationalization, but the truth is much simpler: people are jock-snifffers.
"If he is conservative Obama is the founder of Tea Party."
ReplyDeleteObama is the founder of the Tea Party, in a manner of speaking.
"certain attributes which membership on school teams foster, such as teamwork,work ethic [hard to goof off and graduate if you are on a team],prioritizing time [ditto] decision making- are also helpful in the business world."
Simple physical energy, too - succeeding in business requires lots of stamina. If you're plopping down on the couch mentally and/or physically exhausted after all of a 9 hour day, you probably aren't going to be too successful. Probably a disproportionate share of the really successful men I've known played college sports. None of them were athletic superstars - they were all second-tier athletes on second- and third-tier teams - but they played them.
Plus jocks understand one thing that the grinds do not: there's generally a swashbuckling aspect to success in business and in life. The grinds I've known have done well-ish. The genuine superstars weren't grinds.
The biggest donors are alums married to each other. Especially if they've sent a couple of children to us.
ReplyDeletePeople with strong tribal mentality (conservative) will support their tribe right and wrong.
ReplyDeleteBlack people are actually very tribal, supporting progressive due to self-interest. When coming to gay right, their tribal conservative nature show up in your face.
I attended a top 5 MBA program and the unwritten rule in admissions is that people who played high school sports end up being the most successful in business...
ReplyDeleteAlso, Bloomberg was not secretive about his donations to Johns Hopkins. It was blatantly about control, as he admitted with his first gift to endow an Art History chair, (guess who gets to interpret the meaning of Christian art in the middle ages and Renaissance? not a Christian).
Bloomberg basically bought Hopkins. All other previous major donations to Hopkins were post mortem by WASPs. Bloomberg started a new age of decadent donating while alive, steering the money...
What was it that Lenin said: Hung by the rope they sold him.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was a kid a long time ago everyone knew the Basques in the US dominated shepherding and were simply the best shepherds. Living with the sheep outdoors for months at a time on the range and looking after them. Apparently they had some sort of magical lock on this industry. They were respected. Men would make money then send for women, or sometimes return to the Basque country.
ReplyDeleteYou don't hear of them any more.
End of a Tradition : Young Basque Shepherds No Longer Flock to Calif., April 16, 1989, MILES CORWIN, LA Times.
"Twenty years ago, 95% of the shepherds in Kern County--the largest sheep county in the state--were Basque, Iturriria said. Today, fewer than 10% are Basque..."
In pictures: California's Basque shepherds, BBC.
If schools are trying to weigh in favor of taking on an alumni donor, and if as you say, alumni donors tend to be conservative white men, then why do they do everything possible to turn away conservative white men (fewer opportunities to get in, esp. if a conservative resume, fewer opportunities and assistance while they're there, open discrimination against them [which certainly had the effect on me of saying,"f*ck me if they're ever getting one red cent back from me"], and doing everything they can to try to ridicule and drive out conservatism).
ReplyDeleteExactly. I distinctly remember the Dean telling the incoming batch of engineers that it was a worry or concern that many engineers ended up being conservative after graduation. I didn't much like hearing that, nor did I like the leftist indoctrination in my mandatory non-engineering classes.
If I make any money, they won't be getting any.
>the truth is much simpler: people are jock-sniffers<
ReplyDeleteHere's proof.
At the Ivy I attended, the football coach liked to remind us of the number of football alumni who could (and did) write 8 figure checks to the program or the university at large. I think it was to deter us from quitting. A lot of the big spenders were walk-ons.
ReplyDeleteScarletNumber to Gringo @/2/13, 10:17 AM
ReplyDeleteNice rationalization, but the truth is much simpler: people are jock-snifffers.
Jock-sniffers may help former college athletes get hired, but once inside the company, the former athleters will tend to rise or fall on their own merits.
BTW, when I read of the corporate successes of these former college basketball players, I was surprised. I then tried to find an explanation for it- which you call a rationalization.[One of the former basketball players lived a hippie-like life in tropical climes, so not all went the corporate route.]
Looking into commencement speakers would be a good way to find big donors who aren't high profile. Speaking at commencement is generally a perk given for unloading 16 trillion shekels on the institution.
ReplyDeleteAcademic incompetents who graduate are inevitably the children of big donors, but it'd be harder to get ahold of the Harvard z list than to look up commencement speakers.
Nice article on Basques and sheep-herding in the US, "Basque sheepherding", North American Basque Organization:
ReplyDelete"Essentially unique among American ethnic groups, only in the American West did one group of people become so exclusively identified with just one occupation: Basques & sheepherding."
Interesting: "Ironically these Basque newcomers knew little or nothing about herding sheep; they literally learned on the job. .... one of the loneliest professions in the world."
Sounds like Basques have quite a work ethic. And of course, sheep need lots of real estate...
A Basque Sheep Wagon pic from a Basque Festival in Idaho. Who knew there were so many Basques in Idaho? Just looking at these pics without any additional information, you probably wouldn't classify these people as what Hispanic has come to mean in the US, unless you were trying for some sort of conquistador-Americano stretch.
Of course, these folks go way back in the all-over the world business and creation of the Hispanic world; Basque Juan Elcano was the first ship captain to complete a circumnavigation of the globe.
Clearly not all Basques in California have abandoned the wool and mohair business. Here's a cute story today about goats being used to abate the fire hazard around the San Francisco Intl airport without harming the endangered species. We're talking goats from Orinda. These must be up-scale she-she-la-la high-IQ goats. Their owner's name sounds unusual. Yup, Basque.
ReplyDeleteFYI, John Arrillaga sold much of the land on which the heart of silicon valley is built. Forbes ranked him as the 281st richest American:
"Son of Basque immigrants... converted California farmland into valuable Silicon Valley office space during the 1960s. Duo sold offices to tenants Google and Cisco, created cities of Mountain View and Sunnyvale." Yup, that'll do it.
One does hope that on paper Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen isn't classified as Hispanic and eligible for affirmative action assistance, preferences, etc..
ReplyDeleteWhat about Harvard Yale no athletics there and uber lib.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey
Well, Berkeley does good in sports, actually the conservative colleges are not that good in sports since they are small private ones. Chapman is distance 3 and Hillsdale and Grover College are in 3 or lower. In fact conservatives like liberal sports like football, basketball since they have lots of blacks in them. Same goes for boxing a liberal sport since it has a lot of blacks and Hispanics. Water Polo is more divided between the political parties.