But this essay is not really about the resignation of Larry Summers. It is about Harvard University, the corporation which has an endowment of at least $26 billion. So fat is Harvard that when Summers made the mistake of saying, “inquiring minds want to know whether there are differences between men and women in regards to their scientific and mathematical abilities”, he had to not only apologise over and over again, but allocate $50 million to help women scientists study how women do science at Harvard. Talk about a boondoggle! The faculty at Harvard, so well-fed and so in love with themselves that they don’t mind the wads of money thrown at them at the silliest pretext, seek to assuage their guilty souls by going round the world proclaiming their interest in alleviating poverty and removing discrimination. They do it well according to their standards: publishing a lot of books and presenting a lot of papers.

Still, what about that $26 billion endowment, and the plans that Summers had for raising another five billion dollars (yes, billion) in the next few years? Harvard has so much money that it paid its money managers about $35 million a year to play the stock market. I have not compared numbers, but that would make it most probably the highest salary any executive anywhere in the world earned in a year. In 2003, with about $20 billion in endowment, Harvard’s top six money managers made about $108 million in salaries. And if you go to the Harvard University website, it says of its budget last year: income, $2.6 billion, expenditure, $2.6 billion. That means the money managers must have earned Harvard about nine or ten per cent dividend on the $26 billion investment. Even a one per cent drop in earnings would have meant $250-260 million less in earnings. Hmm, would it not make sense then to pay the money managers those fat sums? So goes the rationale of many of those with deep pockets who contribute regularly to the fat lady’s well being. So goes the rationale for paying fat salaries to Harvard faculty. Summers’ own salary at Harvard hovered around $500,000, which compared to what the money managers made is a small fraction, but more equitable. Maybe, he should just have played the stock market instead for Harvard.

But again, the issue is complex and problematic. Should people give more and more money to richer and richer corporations (which private universities are)? America is a “class society”, and the gap between the classes has continued to widen, and the economy is getting more and more lop-sided. The rich not only got richer in the past decade, they got richer faster. The Reagan economic model of wealth filtering down has really not worked, and we see a country that is getting divided starkly. The poor are getting poorer, and the middle class is getting strangled incrementally.

What affects the individual also affect institutions. The university I teach in, founded in 1839, has an endowment of about $40 million. Compare that to Harvard’s $26,000 million. The top fifty university endowments range from $1billion (Michigan State University) to $22.5 billion (Harvard University), as of 2003-2004. Chock-full of Nobel laureates, teaching small classes and fewer classes, the rich universities attract students from rich families who pay up to $50,000 a year to study in these fancy private education clubs. Despite the well-publicised efforts by Princeton and Harvard to pay for the tuition of middle and lower middle income families, the student body is reflective of the overall lopsidedness of the university profile. Only three per cent of Harvard’s students come from families earning less than $60,000 a year. The rich students who then go on to earn a Harvard MBA, for example, begin life with a $135,000-150,000 salary, which I believe is the salary range for college deans in our university.

We cannot stop people from giving money to whichever institution they wish to support. Social engineering cannot be done or should not be done at that level. What we can do, however, is to appeal to people, and make comparisons of wages, salaries and bank accounts/ endowments public. It is important that smaller universities, state universities, and colleges that cater to the less wealthy get the support they need from the public, which will make the playing field less steep. Wealth that is spread equitably makes for happier citizens and healthier economies.

To conclude, the reams of paper used in describing the travails of Larry Summers, the president of Harvard University, therefore, are less significant than the reams of paper waiting to be used to compare institutions of higher learning in the United States.

Ramesh Rao is Professor of Communications at Longwood University, Virginia, USA.