Howard University student protest -- rats, roaches, mold in student housing for $50k/yr
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Anonymous
| Not Surprised. Worse than Georgetown honestly. |
Anonymous
| What do you expect in DC? It's a cesspool. |
Anonymous
| Didn’t they get a $40 mil donation recently? |
Anonymous
No one gives money to improve aging infrastructure. Big gifts like this are always earmarked for something specific—scholarships, a new academic center, research, professorships. And when gifts are for capital projects, it’s never dorms; donors get excited about state-of-the art academic buildings, stadiums, etc. Mold remediation comes out of operating budget. |
Anonymous
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Isn't university housing and the meal plan often wedded to it a massive cash cow for universities? I mean it's basically ~ $20,000 a year per student to live on campus at every college. In an often crummy dorm that's likely 50 to 100 years old.
In other words, does this mean Howard for years has diverted much of its housing revenue to other operations? |
Anonymous
Is that true? When we've toured colleges with our kids, more often than not the dorms have naming rights to donors. A famous example would be Princeton, where former eBay CEO Margaret Whitman, donated $30M for her own dorm. Houses 500 kids. 
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Anonymous
I’m in higher ed fundraising at at a big-name school, and it’s certainly true in my experience. Clearly there are exceptions, and my “never” above should have said “rarely.” Also, making a gift to construct a single, fancy dream dorm is very different from funding repairs to aging dorms, which was the larger point of my post. Donors fund splashy things or things that make for a strong story, and institutions know that they can’t credibly ask donors to pay for basic operational things (safe, functional living spaces) that are taken as a given. |
Anonymous
| The kids at Columba seem to think it’s a rite of passage to live with the rats and dilapidated buildings. |
Anonymous
| Sounds like the Baltimore City public school where I work! |
Anonymous
Who’s the donor? |
Anonymous
MacKenzie Bezos. |
Anonymous
Her money is always unrestricted. They clearly didn't want to use the money for dorms. |
Anonymous
Actually…part of it is going to infrastructure: https://newsroom.howard.edu/newsroom/article/12951/howard-university-receives-transformative-gift-philanthropist-mackenzie-scott |
Anonymous
Updated to add: but not dorms |