Pick one: college or newspapers?

Steve Coll at The New Yorker is baffled at how a small liberal arts college can have more funds at its disposal than a venerable institution of print media.

Not to pick on any one institution, but, from a constitutional perspective, how did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before September) an endowment well in excess of one billion dollars, while the Washington Post, a fountainhead of Watergate and so much other skeptical and investigative reporting critical to the republic’s health, is in jeopardy. I’m sure that Williams-generated nostalgia in the emotional lives of wealthy people is hard to overestimate, but still …

Yglesias follows up on the point:

One problem here is just that The Washington Post is no Williams. Elite American colleges, whether or not they actually do a good job of educating young people, do a VERY good job of producing nostalgic alumni and prestige for themselves.

True enough, but how many alumni donors are donating out of a sense of nostalgia? Maybe — and as a resolute non-donor to my small elite liberal arts college of choice, this is somewhat ironic — I am being too naive, but don’t many alumni probably donate out of a sense of the value of a liberal education? That may just be the propaganda that we mouth, but even a cynic should acknowledge that the well of “nostalgia” is probably only so deep. A sense of “responsibility” or “appreciation” may be too much, but “guilt tripping” probably accounts for some small pool of the funds.

For the big donors, of course, donating to their alma mater has just become a matter of course; it’s an established practice to do so, so it’s a safe and acceptable place to invest one’s money. Donating to newspapers is not, which is of course at the crux of Coll’s and Yglesias’ arguments. But the unspoken corollary of this world we’ve ended up in, where Williams is awash with money but the Post is near bankrupt, is that people donate to colleges for a point as well, and that these colleges, as much or more than one particular industry, have a certain value.

(image from flickr user SERSeanCrane under a Creative Commons license)

Not everyone can not get into Swarthmore

Oh, poor Barack.

The admissions office may have to keep mum, but senior Joel Mittleman ’09 actually had the chance to personally confirm the rumor when Obama held an open town hall at Strath Haven High School during the Pennsylvania primaries. “I did ask Obama [whether he had been rejected from Swarthmore],” he says…Mittleman recalls the Senator laughing in response, asking him where he heard the information, and then saying “Yes, it’s true. It really broke my heart, actually.”

By my count, the score stands thusly:

Anemic presidential candidates who got into Swarthmore but flopped tremendously in their bid for the White House: 1

Transcendent and inspirational presidential candidates who were rejected from Swarthmore but broke barriers and energized a nation in winning an electoral rout: 1

(h/t Stef)

Swarthmore and the Amazon

Positively Amazonian

Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell are two famous mid-20th century poets.  They wrote a fascinating series of letters to one another, which have been compiled into the recently published book, Words in Air.  In at least one of these letters, Bishop describes her voyage in the Amazon.  Lowell counters with…his trip to Swarthmore.  As reviewer Dan Chiasson puts it,

Who needs the Amazon when you have Swarthmore?

Exactly.  Send all those endangered plants and animals up to our idyllic campus.  We have an arboretum, too.

(Image from Scott Arboretum)