Freesteel Blog » Cambridge University deserves to sink below the rising seas

Cambridge University deserves to sink below the rising seas

Tuesday, February 5th, 2019 at 3:40 pm Written by:

This is just awful. It makes things worse. We need someone to speak truth to these elites, like Rutger Bregman just did at Davos where he said: “Enough with the philanthropy bullshit, just pay your taxes, and then we can improve society.”

Cambridge University provides an intellectually stunted education. Why else would one of their graduates, who made a lot of money on financial speculation, donate a stupendous sum of money for:

  • £79m toward funding PhD scholarships
  • £21m will help fund undergraduate study
  • £1m will go towards funding access efforts for applicants from underrepresented backgrounds.

The most basic due diligence would have revealed that Cambridge (and Oxford) were put into special measures last July 2018 for not fulfilling their obligations of their Access and Participation Plan, which they are required to do in order to charge inflated fees.

The Office For Students, which authorises Cambridge’s fee hike, believes that, while they are spending tens of millions on bursaries for students from low-income households, there is no evidence that the money is actually attracting young people from such backgrounds.

In other words, they already have too much money for this, and they are wasting it.

Exactly the sort of institution a lazy billionaire would look to give his money to — ie not one mile beyond the one place he encountered during his youthful formative years.

Is this evidence he has broadened his horizons during his career? Nope!

Just remember kids, earning a billion dollars does not make you smart.

If it does anything, it makes you stupid.

I mean, if I were surrounded by people telling me I was smart, not needing to concern myself with problematic details where the devil lies, and rarely getting challenged on any of my stupid ideas, my head would be more chock full of dumb stuff than ever. No room for intelligent life.

I don’t blame billionaires for letting their minds go blunt. Staying smart is bloody hard work. What’s the point of being rich if you are going to endure that kind of pain?

No brain can function clearly under the burden of wealth, any more than it can respond to events when it is on alcohol. But unfortunately, while most drunk people now know they are unfit to drive, even when they feel confident, no one has come to terms with the fact that the super-rich are unfit to decide how to allocate wealth. It’s an inevitable a car crash.

I mean, listen to this wooden fence-post of a Vice-Chancellor:

I’m immensely grateful to David and Claudia Harding to for this extraordinary gift to the student support initiative of Cambridge University.

It will transform Cambridge’s ability to attract and retain the very best post-graduate students from across Britain and around the world.

It will also encourage greater philanthropy and support of our undergraduate students…

In October 2018, without blinking, this same Professor Toope announced a £500million target for the Student Support Initiative. So he’s got about another £400million to raise from brainless rich people and then to squander on already ineffective bursaries to fulfill overdue obligations.

At some point I’m going to get phone-banked by these clowns, because they have my address, and this is the university I graduated from. I intend to arrange to meet a representative in person, rather than vent my spleen at the hired call-centre operative they’ll have procured, because this has gone too far.

If the university had one inkling of their problem, they could attempt to convene a panel of randomly selected students from across the country from their target audience and give them the resources to probe the institution about its failings in a way that would make them squirm and then possibly do something.

But that’s not going to happen. This institution, which knows about science, and political corruption, and the future, can’t even wean itself off fossil fuel donations and investments in the face of overwhelming opinion.

Meanwhile, the same rich benefactor, who made his money with algorithmic trading, has also in the past sponsored the Winston Program for the Physics of Sustainability, whose program is notable by the complete absence of anything to do with the very near-future threat to the sustainability of organized human life on this planet.

Just take a look at titles from their Symposium last November 2018:

  • Gravitational wave detectors : precision measurement technologies and their applications
  • Atom Interferometry for Geodesy and Fundamental Physics
  • Taking inspiration from biomechanics to engineering, dragonfly drones and other bio-inspired vehicles
  • Electrical machines: from Microwatts to Gigawatts – the future challenges
  • Implantable Biomedical Microelectromechanical Systems
  • Power at the Nanoscale: Speed, Strength and Efficiency in Biological Motors

Here’s that institute’s inspiring logo, the recycled atom:

According to the institute’s description, “There will be a strong emphasis upon fundamental research that will have importance for the sustainability agenda in the long-term.”

Guess what? After eight years of this crap, the problems we face are now short-term. These guys are from the Island of Laputa without their clappers.

Another thing Mr Harding’s Winton Foundation has donated money for in Cambridge (and presumably found wholly satisfactory) is the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication in which he says:

David Harding: Statistics is an immensely powerful subject, but unfortunately it’s counter-intuitive. (Laughs.) So the normal ordinary human brain trying to do statistical analysis will come firmly and to the wrong and often the opposite conclusion to that which is the right conclusion.

And this is dangerous, tragic, and leads to a very strong shortfall in terms of optimal public policy outcomes, and often outcomes for ourselves in our own lives.

Harding, of course, has an extra-ordinary human brain, and he can see through to the really pressing issues of “Risk, Evidence, and Communication”, such as:

  • The risks of alcohol
  • Predict breast cancer tool release
  • Coffee and cancer
  • Can nine lifestyle changes change dementia risk?
  • The dangers of insecticides, poor statistics and over-enthusiastic press offices
  • Does air pollution kill 40,000 people each year in the UK?
  • How dangerous is burnt toast?

We are totally screwed.

For different reasons, the historian Malcolm Gladwell had also had it with this philanthropy universities crap going on in America and tweeted four years ago:

He followed up with a very fine podcast episode about the phenomenon, where he exposed just how utterly insatiable these institutions are, when there are just so many other places you could make a thousand times more of a difference if you thought about it.

In his interview (minute 25:00) with John Hennessy, the President of Standford University, who was just then ushering in a $750million endowment for the hundred most elite graduates chosen by a panel of wealthy professors from a set of high-flying graduate applicants, Gladwell asked:

Gladwell: How much is enough for an institution like Stanford?

Hennessy: How much is enough? Um. I think if our ambitions don’t grow, then I think you do reach a point where you have enough money, and I would hope that our ambitions for what we would want to do as an institution, both in our teaching and our research, grow

Gladwell: Hypothetically, if Bill Gates or Larry Ellison came to you and said, “I’m giving you ten billion dollars. I’m retiring and my will says everything goes to Stanford.” Would you say, “We don’t know, we don’t need it.” Or would you say, “We can put that money to good use.”

Hennessy: Well, first of all I don’t think either Gates of Ellison is going to give me ten billion dollars, unless I tell them exactly what I’m going to do with it, and how I’m going to make it a good investment. And since I know both of them I can tell you they won’t do it.

Gladwell: Could you make an argument to Ellison that if he gave you ten billion you could put it to good use?

Gladwell (narrating): Ten billion, just to put us in the ball-park, because I worry sometimes that Americans get a little jaded about big numbers. Ten billion is a few billion more than the GDP of Barbados and four billion shy of the GDP of Jamaica. Basically I’m asking what would happen if someone gave you, Stanford, the average economic output of an entire Caribbean country for a year. Tax-free, by the way. The guy who gives the ten billion gets to write it off, and every dollar Stanford earns on that ten billion, they get to keep.

Hennessy: Ten billion. I’d have to do something really dramatic for ten billion dollars. Really dramatic.

Gladwell (narrating): He thinks about it for a moment. Actually I counted. For about two seconds. Then he comes up with something really dramatic.

Hennessy: The one area where I think there is an opportunity for significant incremental funding is in the biomedical sciences. If that were an endowment, for example, so you’re throwing out about a half a billion dollars a year, I could find a way to spend half a billion dollars a year in biomedical research.

Gladwell (narrating): Ten billion! He could totally use another ten billion! At this point, I’m just curious… So I keep posing more and more far-fetched scenarios.

Gladwell: Do ever imagine that a president of Stanford might go to a funder and say, “At this point in our history the best use of your money is to give to the UC System , not Stanford?

Gladwell (narrating): The UC System is the University of California System. Ten schools: Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbra, etc. Maybe the finest group of public universities in the world… In the previous episode I talked about the NYT Access index which is a ranking of the 180 universities in the US according to how good a job they do in finding, educating, and financially supporting low income students. Right now… six of the first seven spots on that list are University of California schools. Stanford has 16,000 students, the UC System has 238,000 students.

So I’m asking John Hennessy, might there ever, ever, be an instance where he might tell a would-be super-philanthropist, “Look, we’ve already got £22billion in the bank, higher than two Caribbean countries combined, and it’s earning us a couple of tax-free billions every year. Your dollar would go further at the public institutions down the street, since they educate 222,000 more students than we do, with a fraction of the endowment.

I’m not holding Hennessy to his answer. I’m not looking for him to make a solemn pledge. I’m just asking.

Hennessy: Well that would be a hard thing to do, obviously, to turn them away. And I think the other question we’d be asked is, “How can I have confidence that they’ll use my money well?” which obviously the president of Stanford is not in a position to vouch for I think.

Gladwell (narrating): Now I realize he has institutional loyalties. He’s the head of Stanford. And I must say, I liked him. But I must say, am I the only the only one who finds his answer ridiculous? Even offensive?

He’s suggesting that he can’t guarantee that the UC System, perhaps the most successful and socially progressive public university system in the world, he can’t guarantee they would use that money well?

As opposed to what? As opposed to spending $800million on a boutique graduate program for a hundred elite students a year: that kind of using money well?

1 Comment

  • 1. James Cranch replies at 7th February 2019, 9:45 pm :

    You’ll probably get called by a volunteer undergraduate, or at least that’s what happened to me. Very chatty and earnest, not tremendously critical.

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