When I was in college, people used to joke about Harvard being a gigantic hedge fund that just happened to run a university as a sideline. These days, the university still has its faculty, its students, and (most importantly of all) its reputation, but the hedge fund seems to have run into a ton of trouble. It’s not only—or even especially—that they’ve lost money in the downturn. Rather, the crux of the matter is that some of their more exotic investments seem to have got them stuck in a nasty liquidity squeeze that’s forcing budget cuts.

Felix Salmon remarks:

And maybe Harvard’s alumni might start giving a lot more now than they have in the past. After all, until recently, any giving from alumni was dwarfed by the investment gains of the endowment, and so the incentive to add another drop to the bucket was greatly reduced. Now, by contrast, cash from alumni is desperately needed to meet the university’s annual liquidity requirements. It might even feel better, giving money when you know it’s going to actually be spent, rather than giving money simply to augment some gargantuan endowment.

My advice to my fellow alumni would be: Don’t.

If you want to give money to an educational institution, do some research and find a charter school in your metropolitan area that’s obtaining good results with a demographically unfavorable group of kids. Or find help our a regional public college of little repute that provides valuable educational services and could really use the money. Sure, if your checkbook is fat enough to finance a research endeavor that could make a major contribution to discovering an HIV vaccine or something it might make sense to invest in a world-famous university. But as a general matter, fancy schools that are already rich and famous and overwhelming serve students from privileged backgrounds are not a good target of charitable giving.

This is hardly an original-to-me point, but you don’t need to look any further than conservatives’ fury at Sonia Sotomayor’s participation in the Ricci appellate decision to see how hollow their complaints about “judicial activism” are. Conservatives just really don’t like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act and they think the situation in New Haven illustrates the injustice of the law as written. So they want the judiciary to reverse its earlier precedents and change things around.

Maybe they’re right or maybe they’re wrong. But this is what judicial activism just is. They could be mounting a campaign in congress to change the law. But instead they’re trying to get the courts to do it for them. You saw the same thing in the other big conservative judicial outrage of recent years, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Kelo eminent domain case. Here, again, what happened was that some lawyers had dreamed up a fairly clever and somewhat plausible argument as to why the court ought to step in and overrule the policy decisions of some elected officials. And what the court did was decline to step in and do that. In response, many jurisdictions passed some different laws putting more restrictions on the use of eminent domain.

In both Ricci and Kelo, in other words, you have courts acting how conservatives say they want courts to act—applying the law-as-written and not inventing new constitutional doctrines to justify wading into political controversies.

Bad news:

George Tiller, the Wichita doctor who became a national lightning rod in the debate over abortion, was shot to death this morning as he walked into church services.

Tiller, 67, was shot just after 10 a.m. at Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th, where he was a member of the congregation. Witnesses and a police source confirmed Tiller was the victim.

Random murder of civilians in order to coerce political concessions doesn’t have a great track-record. But direct action terrorist violence against abortion providers has, I think, proven to be a fairly successful tactic. Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What’s more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.

In general, I think people tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence as a political tactic. But in this particular case, I think people tend to understate it.

I would say that this counts as a more conciliatory posture from our side starting to bear fruit:

With campaigns for the June 12 presidential election in full swing, none of the three challengers have shied away from publicly criticizing Ahmadinejad on topics long considered off-limits for debate in Iran, such as his stance on the country’s nuclear program and his vitriol for Israel. Reformist challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi accused the president of so sullying the nation that Iranian passports are now on par with those of Somalia, the African state that has become a hub of poverty, piracy and terrorism. [...]

Mehdi Karroubi, another liberal challenger, took on the president’s handling of the nuclear program, which Iran says is aimed at civilian energy production but the West believes is meant to eventually produce weapons. Karroubi said Tehran needed to be more transparent and rational in pursuing its goals abroad.

This is one of the virtues of expressing a clear desire for an improved relationship with Iran. Doing so lowers the temperature over there and opens up political space for disagreement about foreign policy objectives. It also clarifies that there’s a real upside to responsible behavior, and a real downside to pushing the envelope on nuclear issues.

Texas had been running an interesting experiment in an alternative to old fashioned affirmation action. The way it worked was that instead of using an explicitly race-conscious admissions formula, instead the University of Texas just guaranteed that the top ten percent of performers from any high school in Texas could gain admission to a UT campus of their choice. I think that struck a lot of people as a reasonable-sounding alternative to race-based formulae that a lot of folks are uncomfortable with. And above all, it accomplished the goal of ensuring that talented students who simply had the misfortune to grow up in a community with a low performing high school didn’t suffer additional penalties for their bad luck over and above the intrinsic disadvantages caused by attending a low performing school.

But now it seems Texas is going to curb this program, too leaving the state with little in the way of remedial admissions efforts.

This, in turn, highlights the extent to which college admissions in this country is often thought about in a backwards way. Our general understanding is that the most resources ought to flow to the “best” schools and the “best” schools ought to serve the “best” students who “deserve” to be able to go there. Under this framework, any departure from a strict scheme of “merit” looks suspicious. But another way to look at things would be to say that of course relatively able students from relatively privileged backgrounds deserve a higher education, but a larger amount of resources ought to flow to the students with more problems. After all, it’s the worse-prepared kids—typically from less privileged backgrounds—who have the most in the way of educational needs. The marginal dollar of either the taxpayer or the charitable donor will do a lot more for society when spent on people who aren’t already the best students.

You often hear that the height limit for buildings in Washington, DC has something to do with the Washington Monument or the dome of the Capitol Building. As this We Love DC post explains that’s wrong. The actual rule is that a building can be no more than 20 feet taller than the width of the street it’s on. Given that DC folks both seem very attached to the policy and also mistaken as to what the policy is, I’ve often wanted to propose that we actually adopt the rule that people think we have, limiting buildings to the height of the Washington Monument. This would approximately triple the permitted density in the central business district.

The We Love DC Folks say they like the short buildings where the are, citing aesthetic considerations. As I’ve said before, I’m sympathetic to this, but folks who want to cite this idea owe it to us to account honestly for the facts. If I were to tell folks in my neighborhood that it would be nice to see a park nearby, I’m sure they all agreed. But if I followed up that the cost of the park was going to be billions of dollars in new taxes, support would probably vanish. The cost of the severe restriction on building height in the central business district and near Metro stations throughout the city is hidden from view, but that makes the lost tax revenue, reduced job opportunities for low income Washingtonians, increased job sprawl and air pollution, etc. all no less real.