A Library for the 99%

In 2011, while public schools suffered another round of flat or shrinking budgets, private university endowments grew over 19%.  This year, federal cuts and fee hikes at public colleges and universities have made this disparity even worse.  Governor Patrick has mitigated some of the misery by refusing to slash education spending― at least for now.  Still, the ever-increasing gap between public and private schools in Massachusetts invites the revival of a measure that lawmakers floated in 2008: imposing a fee on educational endowments that exceed $1 billion. 

Despite strong public support, the idea went to the cemetery known as “further study,” partly because it seemed like a thoughtless grab for cash.  This fate could have been avoided if we had taken two simple steps, namely, setting the fee low enough to silence objections from the miserly elite and specifying that the revenue would be devoted exclusively to education.

So here’s a proposal that would benefit the few as much as the many, students at Williams as much as those at Bunker Hill: let’s charge a 0.1% fee to billion+ endowments to fund the creation of a public digital library that would service educational institutions across the Commonwealth.  This tiny fee wouldn’t deliver the windfall imagined back when endowments were ascending into the stratosphere. However, the $50+ million that could be raised annually from the private schools that have prospered most on public charity would be plenty to develop and maintain digital archives, courseware, and educational programs that could reach into every classroom, including those at the eight institutions whose endowments currently exceed $1 billion: Amherst, Boston College, Harvard, MIT, Smith, Tufts, Wellesley, and Williams.

Gaining access to expanding collections of e-books, primary documents, and multimedia resources would more than offset the charge to ultra-rich institutions.   But a truly significant change would be felt by downscale students who have never seen the educational wonders enjoyed by their upscale counterparts.  Yes, a few private universities have increased public access to digital resources, but while outsiders can find course materials at MIT, and Harvard permits us to view selections from its unparalleled collections, anyone seeking equal access to educational content on the web sites of these and other private schools soon confronts a demand for an institutional I.D.

People who believe that these schools have every right to hoard their assets should remember that most of them were supported directly by the public for decades.  Harvard, MIT, and Williams were, for example, originally established with public funds, and when their present status as charitable institutions was debated in the early twentieth century, lawmakers exempted them from taxes for two reasons: A) the state had no other way to promote higher education B) private colleges could not generate enough revenue to sustain themselves without government help.

Legislators did not foresee the advent of our public college and university system, and, of course, they never dreamed that the richest endowments add up to over $50 billion, as they do now.  Still, it can be argued that, like other charitable institutions, these schools deserve their tax-exempt status because they promote a public good.  However, this good is not the elevation of a select group of students. Instead, it’s the promotion of higher education in general, a purpose that is supposed to benefit everyone in Massachusetts. As Charles W. Eliot, President of Harvard College, testified before the Legislature in 1906, endowments should not be taxed because they are “gifts ‘to a general public use, which extends to the poor as well as the rich,’ to quote Lord Camden’s definition of a charity;” and thus, “it is the public which is the real enjoyer of all such property.”  If we accept Eliot’s rationale, it’s plain that supporting a public digital library would let wealthy schools fulfill their mission more completely by enabling the public to become “the real enjoyer” of otherwise private assets.   

Despite double-digit growth, some billion+ schools might complain that 0.1% is too much to give to the public, that is, to the people who have handed them massive tax breaks for so long.  But if they won’t honor the commitment that gave them charity status, then why should we extend the special treatment that allowed them to amass such astonishing wealth?

Learn more at http://www.facebook.com/MassDigitalLibrary.

Sample page of multimedia curricular materials (rough draft)