The Call to Nationalize Private University Endowments April 20th, 2016 Crain’s Chicago Weekly published a fascinating, head-scratching and troubling opinion piece recently by two professors from the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northeastern Illinois University critical of the “wealth hoarding” of large private research institutions. Do government leaders at the federal and state level really represent the best “hands on the purse strings” given the professors’ analysis of the state of the public higher education impasse in Illinois? When Harvard’s Drew Faust has to explain to Congress how endowments are built from a combination of restricted and unrestricted funds, is the primer so basic that the Congressional hearing is at best premature or maybe even unnecessary?
