July 20, 2016 • 39 mins
In the early ’90s, Hank Rowan gave $100 million to a tiny public university in Glassboro, New Jersey: not Harvard, not Yale, not even to his alma mater, MIT. What was Rowan thinking? And why has it proven so difficult for other philanthropists to follow his lead?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. In Glassboro, New Jersey, a little community half an
hour south of Philadelphia, there's a statue right by the
road as you drive into town. It's of a man
named Henry Rowan. He liked to be called Hank. Whenever
Hank Roan came to Glassboro, he was mobbed like a
rock star, which probably embarrassed him because he wasn't given
(00:37):
to those kinds of displays. When Hank Rowan died in
December of twenty fifteen, there was a huge memorial service.
Then in the evening, students from the local college gathered
around his statue, holding candles and sang for him as
earnestly as only college kids can. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
(01:18):
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and misunderstood. This episode is my eulogy for Hank Rowan.
I never met him, but he's a hero of mine.
I want to understand why he didn't become everyone's hero.
(01:42):
Why Hank Rowan's example didn't spread beyond glass Grown, New Jersey.
He was six foot one or so, not not a
huge football player size, and you know, one hundred and
eighty pounds, no thin but not skinny and had a
(02:03):
loud voice, strong presence, and yeah he was. It was
his management style, like benevolent dictator. I think that's Rowan's daughter,
Jinny Smith. She now runs the company her father started
in nineteen fifty three. It's called Inductotherm. It's right off
the New Jersey Turnpike. They make industrial furnaces from melting metal.
(02:25):
He started the company basically in our garage and then
he sold his first job to the Mint, which was
kind of fun, and then the second job to Ge
and then the furnaces just got bigger and bigger. Now
some of them are fifty tons. They're just huge. And
kept branching out and acquired some companies and it kind
of it grew like topsy. But he also worked very,
(02:46):
very hard at it and hired good people. Rowan built
in Ducto them into a multinational corporation, thousands of employees
around the world, and he became a very wealthy man,
although you wouldn't have known it. You know, he run
around in scuff shoes and trials, not worried about that.
He didn't care how he dressed or looked. Roan was
an engineer race sailboats, flu planes bleed in hard work,
(03:09):
free enterprise. But you couldn't get him to buy a
fancy car. He was a nash rambler guy in the
early days, and he pooh pooed Mercedes because Mercedes wasn't
one of our customers. What did he drive? Sort of
nearly near He drove Ozmo bills and Buicks and finally
the company here in city drive a Lincoln. I drove
(03:30):
it into the ground just about. Oh. I had a
Cadillac once, but he towed his boots with that too,
because it had a bigger engine. You know, none of
us drive around a wave with people stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Almost thirty years ago, Hank Rowan became friends with a
man named phil to Mania Too. Manya was head of
development for the local college, Glassborough State, just down the road,
(03:52):
a little university started back in the nineteen twenties on
twenty five acres too. Many a would drop by and
see Rowan on his way up to Trenton. Everyone involved
with Glassborough and Rowan has their own version of this story,
but here's how Rowan remembered it in an interview he
gave a few years before he died. It's with Don Ferrish.
She was the former president of Glassborough State. He asked
(04:13):
Rowan how he first got involved with the college. Well,
I think we blame it all on Phil too media,
because he came to see me and asked if I
might make a donation to the scholarship fund of fifteen
hundred dollars. Well that sounded easy, fifteen hundred hundreds, So
we gave him fifteen hundred dollars. And you know what
(04:34):
he came back to many I wanted Rowan to give
money to the business school, which was pretty dilapidated. So
he pushed that for a while and I said, Phil,
I have zero interest in your school of business. What
this world needs is more engineering, how to make things
we have to produce? And Phil, what would you do
(04:57):
with one hundred million dollars? And herself off the chair?
But that's how we got to that level, and what's
the beginning. So you're the that suggested one hundred million
dollars figure you were talking about? Can I see? This
is nineteen ninety two, a generation ago. Almost nobody gave
(05:19):
donations of one hundred million dollars. Back then, this was
unheard of money. Roland's gift made headlines around the country.
He set a new standard. Did you think it changed
the world? Them? Ready? At Roland's memorial service filled too many,
it gets up and says, I think accurately that Roan
is the person who triggered what has become one of
(05:39):
the greatest explosions in educational philanthropy since the days of
Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers. From ju Why of nineteen
ninety two until the end of that decade, twenty gifts
twenty gifts of one hundred million dollars of you were
given out in this country. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
(06:00):
As of right now spring of twenty sixteen, we're up
to eighty seven gifts of one hundred million dollars or
more to higher education. So everyone followed Rowan's lead, except
not really. Rowan gave his money to Glasborough State College,
a public university in a sleepy little town in South
(06:22):
Jersey that no one had ever heard of. The college
was close to broke at the time. They had an
endowment of seven hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. But
the people who followed Hank Rowan, who were inspired by
the size of his donation, almost all of them gave
money to wealthy, prestigious schools. Let me just read to
(06:43):
you the names of some of the educational institutions that
had received the largest donations in American history. Ready, in
twenty thirteen, the billionaire co founder of Nike, Phil Knight,
pledged half a billion to the Oregon Health and Science
University in Portland, Okay. Not the most prestigious institution in America.
But wait, then come three four hundred million dollar donations.
(07:08):
The first is the millionaire John Klugey's gift to Columbia
University in two thousand and seven. The second is the
hedge fund manager John Paulson's gift to Harvard University in
twenty fifteen. The third is Phil Knight's gift to Stanford
University in twenty sixteen. And after that, in order, here
are the universities that get the biggest donations. JOHNS. Hopkins,
(07:29):
Harvard again, University of Chicago, Princeton, Tufts, Carnegie, Mellon, Cornell, Yale, Penn, Claremont, McKenna,
Columbia again, Baylor, USC Columbia third time, Michigan, University of California, Wisconsin.
I could go on if you want, through all eighty seven,
but Basically, we're talking about the same wealthy, elite schools
(07:52):
getting the biggest donations again and again. Hank Rowan did
something unprecedented, and nobody followed him. This episode is the
third in my three part revisionist history miniseries re examining
the promise of higher education. The first installment was about
(08:15):
why the educational system struggles to find talented low income students.
The second episode was a comparison of Vasser in Bodin
and why it's so difficult for some colleges to find
the money for financial aid. But today I want to
talk about educational philanthropy, which I think is an issue
that doesn't get talked about early enough. Higher education in
(08:36):
the United States runs on philanthropy. There are almost no
schools that can pay their bills just on the strength
of students tuition. Those days are over. Philanthropy is what
makes the wheels turn. But there's a problem. A lot
of that philanthropy doesn't make any sense. It's going to
the wrong places for the wrong reasons. Those of you
(09:02):
who follow me on Twitter will know that I'm obsessed
with this issue. After John Paulson gave his four hundred
million dollars to Harvard and fifteen I had a kind
of Twitter melt down, sending tweet after tweet, including it
came down to helping the poor or giving the world's
richest university four undred million dollars. It doesn't need wise choice, John,
(09:22):
And then if billionaires don't step up, Harvard will soon
be down to its last thirty billion. Then when Phil
Knight gave four undred million dollars to Stanford, I got
called up for comment by The New York Times. I
said that Stamford was part of a crazy arms race
and ought to cut its endowment in half and give
the balance to schools that actually need the money. The
(09:42):
next day, I got an email from the President of Stanford,
John Hennessey. He wanted to get together and convince me
I was wrong. So I talked to him, and we'll
get to that conversation in a minute. For now, I
will only say that I was completely baffled by my
talk with Hennessey. It was as if he and I
were speaking different languages. I understand the people who give
(10:05):
money to those who need money, the people who give
money to the those who already have all the money
they need. I don't understand that what are they thinking.
Let me run an idea by you, which I think
helps to frame this question. It has to do with soccer, actually,
(10:25):
the difference between soccer and basketball. This idea comes from
two economists named David Sally and Chris Anderson, who wrote
a really great book a couple of years ago about
soccer called The Numbers Game. One of the questions they
asked was what matters more if you want to build
a great soccer team, how good your best player is
or how good your worst player is? And their answer was,
(10:48):
in soccer, what matters is how good your worst player is.
Soccer is a game where if you get a single goal,
if you just happen to be lucky, that goal may
hold up. That's David Sally, and so mistakes turn out
to be a very important part of soccer is a
team sport that leads you to think about well, mistakes
(11:09):
more often happen or more often produced by weaker players
on the pitch. Sally's argument goes like this, a soccer
team has eleven players on the field at any one time.
Suppose one is a superstar, and your worst player is
maybe only forty five percent as good as a superstar.
Because Soccer is a sport where everyone on the field
depends on everyone else. That forty five percent player can
(11:33):
make one mistake and completely negate the skill of the
best player. You can have eight beautiful passes in a row,
but if your worst player, you're forty five percent player,
botches the ninth then all the previous eight beautiful passes
are all wasted. That's right, And because of the nature
of soccer, those eight beautiful passes may have only increased
(11:53):
your likelihood of victory by a small percent, but then
it goes right back to zero because somebody turns the
ball over. Sally and Anderson did a statistical analysis. They
looked at the top soccer clubs in Europe and showed
that if those teams upgraded their poorest players instead of
their best players, they would score more goals and win
more games a lot more. Soccer is a weak link game. Yes,
(12:18):
having a better superstar was of course better, but actually
having a better end of the bench or eleventh guy
on the pitch was actually more influential to whether won
matches or not, which would be the exact opposite of basketball. Yeah,
basketball is probably the opposite end of the continuum from
if you think about. Soccer is maybe the weakest link sport.
(12:40):
Basketball is probably the most superstar different team sport that
we have. Even the greatest basketball teams often have won,
and sometimes even two players who are barely better than mediocre.
What matters in basketball is not how good your fifth
player is, It's how good your superstar is. It's a
strong link game. Think about Lionel Messi, maybe the greatest
(13:03):
soccer player of his generation, versus Michael Jordan, the greatest
basketball player of his generation. Jordan could do on a
basketball court was Jordan could guarantee or virtually guarantee that
he could get the ball. You couldn't really stop him, right.
He could go to the backcourt, pick up the ball.
He could dribble it forward. He could break double teams.
(13:23):
You could try to send three guys at him, but
then you're really you're really opening yourself up. He could
go and get a shot. Leo Messi is so good
that sometimes fun rare times where in fact he can
dribble the length of the pitch. But the fact is
that in most instances he really can't. He needs to
be He needs those eight beautiful passes to set him
(13:45):
up and then he could do something amazingly transcendent with it.
I think the weak link strong link distinction is incredibly
useful in making sense of certain kinds of problems. Suppose
I said to you, for example, here's fifty billion dollars.
(14:05):
Spend it in a way that makes air travel in
the United States more efficient. The last thing you would
do is to go to Denver, which has that big,
gorgeous new airport, and make it even bigger and even
more gorgeous. No, you go to the worst and most
crowded airports in a country, LaGuardia, Newark, Kennedy, and make
them better. Because every single day, delays at Newark and
(14:26):
LaGuardia and Kennedy ripple across the country and delay planes everywhere.
You'd spend all fifty billion dollars in New York. If
you do that, you're essentially saying air travel in the
United States is a weak link problem. We're limited by
how good our appalling New York airports are more than
by how good our best airports are. Here's another example.
(14:49):
One of the great puzzles of the Industrial Revolution is
why it began in England, why not France or Germany.
One theory is that Britain was lucky enough to have
more geniuses than anyone else, like James Watt who invents
the steam engine. But there's an economist named Joel Moker
who makes a really compelling argument that England's is that
(15:09):
it had way more craftsmen and skilled engineers and experienced
in mechanically minded backyard tinkerers than anyone else. Those were
the people who are able to take those inventions and
perfect them and make them useful. Moker is saying that
the Industrial Revolution was a weak link phenomenon, not a
strong link phenomenon, and because Britain had more craftsmen than
(15:32):
France or Germany, that gave Britain a huge advantage. So
what's Hank Rowan. Hank Roan is a weak link guy.
He wants to make a difference to make his country
a better place, and he thinks the best way to
do that is to improve the forty five percent player,
(15:52):
not the superstar. He thinks America is soccer, not basketball.
You're a graduate of MIT. Right here he is again
in the interview with Don Ferish of Glassborough State. Now,
I would assume that MIT at that time would have
been interested in receiving a gift of that size from you,
(16:12):
did you did you think about giving it to that university?
You know? Okay, they were at the time trying to
raise seven hundred and fifty million dollars, and my little
hunter Man wouldn't have made hardly any immage at all,
hardly any difference at all. That's David Sally's point about soccer.
(16:37):
Upgrading the superstar doesn't help as much as upgrading the
worst player. Here's Hank Rowan's daughter Jinny again. Basically, he
said mt had the greatest engineering school bar none. He
said it was the best education he could ever imagine.
And he said, I'm sure they would do good things
with my money, they'd build a building or do something positive.
But he said it wouldn't make the difference that it's
(16:59):
going to make down here. He said, I enjoy making
a difference in this world. So he funds an engineering
school in Glassboro. It's not the best or the fancy
engineering school in the country, but it's not supposed to be.
So it's one one four story buildings at fours, at
three it's three story building, and then it has two
wings to end these labs, we'll go walked down. I
(17:22):
went for a tour with Joe Cardona, the university's head
of PR. You know, we're in a state institution, so
a building like this was like wow, whiz bang. You know,
look it's an engineering building and so here, why don't
we just walk down the holidawn Yeah. The school was
built in the mid nineteen nineties for five hundred students.
They've now crammed seven hundred and fifty into the building
(17:43):
while they wait for a new annex to be finished
next door. Eventually they want to double the school's size.
The point is not to be more exclusive, it's to
get bigger to serve more students. Cardona and I stopped
by a lab where a group of students were working
on a Baja car, basically a home engineer dune buggy
that will race against other engineering schools on an endurance course.
(18:06):
So we got some aircraft grade aluminum. We have a
two access water jack cutter that can cut out profiles,
and we design a part that's bolted together that way.
It's nice and strong and they're granted bolt but if
it does break, you can replace individual pieces without having
to make a whole new assembly. The four students I
meet Matt, John Owen, and Kyle all grew up around here.
(18:26):
Are most of the people students in the engineering school
from New Jersey? I would say, yeah, yeah. Net tuition
in state is about nine thousand dollars a year, which
is pretty reasonable for an engineering school. Ninety five percent
get jobs in engineering when they graduate, and they really
want to do what I called a blue collar research,
(18:48):
research that is practical that people can see the tangible
result of Ali Hushman, the university's president. He's an immigrant
from Iran. He grew up in a slum in Tehran,
fifth in a family of ten. People used to ask
me to compare that said, the best comparison would be
to tell you, if you have seen slum Dog Millionaire,
you look at that this phone was twice as hard
(19:09):
and tough. Yes, we're a very close family, but very poor.
I mean poor to the extent that you would walk
in the streets without shoes. Hushman runs marathons, which is
kind of what you'd expect, right for someone who made
it out of the slums of Tehran, A typical student
at the engineering school where they from. Can you give
(19:31):
me a kind of profile of a profile of a
kid from engineering. Your father is a you know, fireman,
and a mom is a teacher. The kid has been
going to a public school. He's from fourteen miles from here,
and he's just a brilliant young men or woman gone
(19:52):
through public school and got great schools and very much focused.
He's you another word, Yes, yes, school full of alli. Yes. Yeah,
that's that's the beauty of it, Malcolm. That's why I
say it's a blue collar university. Now I'm convinced by
Ali Hushmun and by Hank Rowan. I think American society
(20:14):
really is soccer. We're so interdependent and we need so
many perfect passes to score a goal that our challenges
are weak link, not strong link. What matters is how
good our eleventh player is, not our first. We're in
a second industrial Revolution, and the lesson of this one
isn't any different from the lesson of the last one.
(20:36):
But it's really hard to get people to accept weak
link arguments. David Sally, the economist who studied soccer, says
he'll go to some billionaire oligarch who owns an English
Premier League team and say, don't spend your eighty million
pounds on one superstar player spend it on four pretty
good players at twenty million pounds each, but the oligarch
(20:59):
doesn't want to hear that. If the oligarch is only
worried about winning soccer matches, I can sell that that's believable.
Oligarchs by teams for many other reasons, including wanting to
hang out with really good looking soccer strikers and wanting
to sell a lot of shirts. A week lined strategy
(21:20):
is not going to be the most glamorous thing, and
that's the problem. Superstars are glamorous. Nobel Prize winners are glamorous.
Regional universities in rural South Jersey and solid capable midfielders
are not. What people remember are the unbelievably beautiful goals.
(21:41):
It's a brilliant run for messing goals. They may not
realize that the seven, maybe less glamorous passes that's set
up that eighth beautiful through ball were maybe arguably just
as important, but they were much more mundane and they
just involved simple movement to open spaces, and people don't
(22:04):
adequately value that. When we asked ourselves the question, what
could Stanford do to make a better contribution to the world,
we quickly converged on building a scholarship program that would
bring the most talented students and prepare them to be
leaders in the world, to lead on attacking the important problem.
(22:26):
John Hennessy, president of Stanford University since two thousand, widely
considered one of the greatest presidents in Stanford history. As
I began to think about the end of my term
as president, I started to think, was there something else
perhaps we could do where we could build on everything
(22:47):
we've put in place at Stanford and offer something that
would be a great thing for the world. Not long
before we talked, I took a walk across the Stanford
campus and it's like entering a shrine to higher education.
Everything is gleaming, gorgeous, groomed green. That's all Hennessy's work.
(23:09):
He's transformed the school, doubled the endowment from eleven to
twenty two billion dollars, made it into maybe the greatest
university in the world. When we talked, he was just
about to retire and thinking about his legacy. Many people,
myself included, became increasingly concerned about what we saw as
(23:30):
a void in great leadership around the world, in the
public sector as well as in the private sector. Hennessy
decided he wanted to start a graduate program kind of
like the Rhodes Scholarship. Every year, it would bring one
hundred of the brightest, most accomplished college grads from around
the world to Stanford and let them apply their minds
(23:51):
to the problems of the world. He goes to his deans,
then his trustees. Everyone loves the idea, and then over
the summer last summer, I went to Phil Knight and
explained the idea to him, and he was enthusiastic about
it and came back a month later and said he'd
help us make it happen. Remember, Phil Knight is the
co founder of Nike, a billionaire many times over, and
(24:14):
a serious philanthropist. How did you pick Phil Knight as
someone to approach? Was he the first person you approached?
I knew Phil had been concerned about leadership globally. He
and I had had a good working relationship. So he
ends up giving four hundred million. How does what arrive
at that number? Is that a number you suggested to him?
It's roughly half. I mean where our goal is somewhere
(24:36):
in the seven fifty to eight hundred to implement the
entire program secure it permanently, and so I think in
the past finding a naming gift that of that scale
is probably necessary, and then you can find gifts to
fill in the rest of it. It was my criticism
of the phil Knight donation that led Hennessy to get
in touch with me. He wanted to explain his thinking,
(25:00):
which is John Hennessy wants to do a great thing
for the world, So he sets up an eight hundred
million dollar graduate program for one hundred elites to He's
the anti Rowan, right, Hank Rowan wanted to start at
the bottom and tries to lift as many people up
as possible. Hennessy starts at the top and lavishes eight
(25:21):
hundred million on the most exclusive group he can find.
Rohan is a week Link guy. His world is soccer.
Hennessy is playing basketball and he wants to focus his
billions on the superstars. In the time you've been at Stanford,
that went from what from eleven to twenty two? Is that? Right? Yeah?
Probably about eleven to twenty two? Right. Most of that
(25:44):
endowment returns not mostly gifts, but there's some gifts in
there too. Obviously, what is uh, how much is enough
for institution, Linke Stanford, how much is enough? I think
we if our ambitions don't grow, then I think you
(26:04):
do reach a point where you have enough money, and
I would hope that our ambitions for what we want
to do as an institution, both and our teaching and
our research grow. In other words, there really isn't such
a thing at Stanford as enough money. The school's ambitions
(26:25):
are always growing, so it's endowment should too. Just because
you already have more resources than almost anyone else doesn't
mean you should stop collecting even more resources. Hennessey is
a hardcore strong linker. Hypothetically, if you know Bill Gates
or Larry Ellison came to you and said, I'm giving
(26:46):
you ten billion dollars, I'm retiring and I'm giving it all.
My will says everything goes to Stanford. I mean, would
you say we don't know, we don't need it, or
would you say we can put that money to good use. Well,
first of all, I don't think either either Larry Ellison
(27:06):
or Bill Gates is going to give me ten billion
dollars unless I tell them exactly what I'm going to
do with it and how I'm going to make it
a good investment. And since I know both I know
both of them, I can tell you they won't they
won't do it. Could you make an argument to Larry
Allison as you could put if he gave you ten billion,
you could put it to good use ten billion just
(27:27):
to put us in the ballpark. Because I worry sometimes
that Americans get a little jaded about big numbers. Ten
billion is a few billion more than the gross domestic
product of Barbados, and four billion shy of the gross
domestic product of Jamaica. Basically, I'm asking what would happen
if someone gave you Stanford the average economic output of
(27:50):
an entire Caribbean country for a year, tax free. By
the way, the guy who gives the ten billion gets
to write it off, and every dollar Stanford earns on
that ten billion, they get to keep ten billion. I'd
have to do something really dramatic for ten billion dollars,
really dramatic. He thinks about it for a moment. Actually
(28:12):
I counted for about two seconds. Then he comes up
with something really dramatic. The one area where I think
there is an opportunity for significant incremental funding is in
the biomedical sciences. If that were an endowment, for example,
so you're throwing out a half a billion dollars a year.
(28:34):
I could find a way to spend a half a
billion dollars a year in biomedical research ten billion. He
could totally use another ten billion. At this point, I'm
just curious. I mean, I've read about strong length thinkers
in books, but I've never actually talked with one before.
(28:55):
So I keep posing more and more far fetched scenarios.
Do you ever imagine that a president of Stanford might
go to a funder and say, at this point in
our history, the best use of your money is to
give to the UC system, not to Stanford. The UC
system is the University of California system ten schools Berkeley, UCLA,
(29:16):
San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbara, etc. Maybe the finest group
of public universities in the world. If you listen to
the previous episode of Revisionist History, the one about Vasser,
I talked about the New York Times Access Index. It's
a ranking of one hundred and eighty universities in the
US according to how good a job they do in finding, educating,
(29:37):
and financially supporting low income students. Right now, Vasser comes
in eighth well six of the first seven spots on
that list. Our University of California schools. Stanford has sixteen
thousand students. The UC system has two hundred and thirty
eight thousand students. So I'm asking John Hennessy, might there
(29:59):
ever ever be an instance where he might tell a
would be super philanthropist. Look, we've already got twenty two
billion dollars in the bank, higher than the output of
two Caribbean countries, and it's earning us a couple of
tax free billions every year. Your dollar would go further
at the public institutions down the street, since they educate
(30:22):
two hundred and twenty two thousand more students than we
do with a fraction of the endowment. I'm not holding
Hennessey to his answer. I'm not looking for him to
make a solemn pledge. I'm just asking, well, that would
be a hard thing to do, obviously, to turn them
turn them away. And I think the other question we'd
(30:45):
be asked is how can I have confidence that they'll
use my money well, which we're obviously the president of
Stanford is not in a position to vouch for I
think now I realize he has institutional loyalties he's the
head of Stanford, and I must say I like Tennessee.
But am I the only one who finds his answer
(31:05):
ridiculous even offensive? He's suggesting that he can't guarantee that
the UC system may be the most successful and socially
progressive public university system in the world. He can't guarantee
they would use that money well as opposed to what
as opposed to spending eight hundred million dollars on a
(31:27):
boutique graduate program for one hundred elite students a year.
That kind of using money, Well, it is the pre
eminent scholarship program. You'll get the best and brightest young
men and women from around the world who will receive
a graduate education at the world's best university when this
program is established. That's the promotional video for the scholarship fund.
(31:47):
You just heard Phil Knight talking about it. You can
watch all four minutes and twenty three seconds of it
at revisionist history dot com. It's impressive, lots of drone
aerial shots of Stanford's spotless, palm lined avenues. But let's
do the math on the scholarship. Hennessy's plan is to
(32:07):
fund it from the proceeds of investing eight hundred million dollars.
It's an endowment. The usual rule of thumb is that
an endowment gives you about five percent a year, so
forty million dollars and with one hundred students a year
in a three year program, that comes out to one
hundred and thirty three thousand dollars per student. One hundred
and thirty three thousand dollars per student per year. Our
(32:31):
precious medals also involved helicopters. Are they doing this on
a beach at Saint Bart's. When Hennessey announced this scholarship,
he gave an example of the kind of issues that
perhaps these mega scholars could tackle. He thought that they
could look at the effects of the hundred million dollars
gift that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave to the
New Jersey public school system. Newark historically has some of
(32:55):
the worst public schools in the country, and I guess
the reason Hennessey thought Suckerberg's gift needed to be studied
was that there's a feeling among some that the donation
hasn't had quite the impact people thought it might. This
is the exact quote Hennessy gave to The New York
Times nobody understood the real difficulty in making significant change
(33:16):
in the public education system. The first thing that the
strong Link guy wants to do with his crack team
of eight hundred million dollars scholars is critiqued the weak
Link decision to spend one hundred million dollars on poor kids.
A billionaire gives a fortune to an elite school in
order to understand why another billionaire's donation to a poor
(33:39):
school isn't working out? And what if Stanford's mega million
dollars scholars can't answer that question, should another billionaire give
even more money to an even more elite school to
answer the question of why the four hundred million dollars
a gift to study the one hundred million dollars gift
hasn't worked out. Please stop me before I tweet again.
(34:04):
I'm not saying that the strong Link approach is never appropriate.
I grew up in Canada in the nineteen seventies and
at that time the country had lots of good universities,
but there was a feeling that what the country needed
was at least one world class science in technology university.
So they created that the University of Waterloo, and it
was a great idea. But the United States today is
(34:28):
not Canada in the nineteen seventies. It does not suffer
from an excess of egalitarianism. It suffers from the opposite problem.
Its strong links have never been stronger. And when you
make strong link arguments at a time like now, you
end up sounding ridiculous. Just listen. February twenty fourteen, the
(34:53):
billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin gives one hundred and
fifty million dollars to Harvard. It's to support Harvard's financial
aid program. Here's what the president of Harvard says. Ken
Griffin's extraordinary philanthropy is opening Harvard's gate. It's wider to
the most talented students in the world, no matter their
economic circumstances. And here's what Ken Griffin says. My goal
(35:19):
with this gift is to make sure and this is
the exact quote, that our nation's best and brightest have
continued access to this outstanding institution. Now, let me remind you,
at the time of Griffin's gift, Harvard had an endowment
of thirty six billion dollars. So a billionaire gives one
(35:39):
hundred and fifty million to an institution that has an
endowment of thirty six billion, because he thinks the school
needs help opening its gates wider to the most talented
students in the world. Because he's worried that thirty six
billion might not be enough to ensure continued access to
this outstanding institution. These two comments were not off the
(36:02):
cough remarks. I'm reading them from the official Harvard press release.
Trained professionals perfected those quotes. Smart Harvard educated people approved them.
They probably sat down in teams around a long oak
antique conference table dating back to the eighteen hundreds and
came up with what they thought was the most compelling
(36:22):
justification for why giving another one hundred and fifty million
dollars to Harvard is a good idea? Is that the
best they could come up with. We're talking because I,
as you know, have been critical of some of the
I'm part of the backlash. I guess back to my
conversation with John Hennessy of Stanford, and I'm just curious
(36:43):
about whether how common or how often do you run
into two backlash to people saying enough with some of
these large Am I a lonely voice or is this
something that you have encountered a lot and think about
a lot. We don't encounter it a lot. I would say,
(37:05):
I think the reason we probably don't encounter it is
that we um don't view this as who gets the
biggest slice of pie here? We view it as, um,
what can we do? What can we do to that's transformative?
How can we increase our contributions of the world. I
(37:27):
mentioned maybe the most obvious criticism of what Stanford is doing,
and he says, we don't encounter it a lot. Apparently
the President of Stanford only encounters people who look at
American higher education and conclude that what it really needs
is more money at the top. With all due respect,
the President of Stanford needs to get out more. Take
(37:50):
a little trip to Glassborough, New Jersey, to the campus
of what's now called Rowan University. Maybe take a look
at the statue up front. Everything you've been listening to
(38:15):
Revisionist History, sometimes the past deserves a second chance. If
you like what you've heard, we'd love it. If you
rate us on iTunes, it helps a lot. You can
find more information about this and other episodes at revisionist
history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
show is produced by Meilabal, Roxane Scott and Jacob Smith.
(38:38):
Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Guerra and Taka yazoo Zawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer.
Fact checker Michelle Sarroca. Thanks to the Penalty Management team
Laura Mayor, Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Pushkin. In Glassboro, New Jersey, a little community half an
hour south of Philadelphia, there's a statue right by the
road as you drive into town. It's of a man
named Henry Rowan. He liked to be called Hank. Whenever
Hank Roan came to Glassboro, he was mobbed like a
rock star, which probably embarrassed him because he wasn't given
(00:37):
to those kinds of displays. When Hank Rowan died in
December of twenty fifteen, there was a huge memorial service.
Then in the evening, students from the local college gathered
around his statue, holding candles and sang for him as
earnestly as only college kids can. My name is Malcolm Gladwell.
(01:18):
You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked
and misunderstood. This episode is my eulogy for Hank Rowan.
I never met him, but he's a hero of mine.
I want to understand why he didn't become everyone's hero.
(01:42):
Why Hank Rowan's example didn't spread beyond glass Grown, New Jersey.
He was six foot one or so, not not a
huge football player size, and you know, one hundred and
eighty pounds, no thin but not skinny and had a
(02:03):
loud voice, strong presence, and yeah he was. It was
his management style, like benevolent dictator. I think that's Rowan's daughter,
Jinny Smith. She now runs the company her father started
in nineteen fifty three. It's called Inductotherm. It's right off
the New Jersey Turnpike. They make industrial furnaces from melting metal.
(02:25):
He started the company basically in our garage and then
he sold his first job to the Mint, which was
kind of fun, and then the second job to Ge
and then the furnaces just got bigger and bigger. Now
some of them are fifty tons. They're just huge. And
kept branching out and acquired some companies and it kind
of it grew like topsy. But he also worked very,
(02:46):
very hard at it and hired good people. Rowan built
in Ducto them into a multinational corporation, thousands of employees
around the world, and he became a very wealthy man,
although you wouldn't have known it. You know, he run
around in scuff shoes and trials, not worried about that.
He didn't care how he dressed or looked. Roan was
an engineer race sailboats, flu planes bleed in hard work,
(03:09):
free enterprise. But you couldn't get him to buy a
fancy car. He was a nash rambler guy in the
early days, and he pooh pooed Mercedes because Mercedes wasn't
one of our customers. What did he drive? Sort of
nearly near He drove Ozmo bills and Buicks and finally
the company here in city drive a Lincoln. I drove
(03:30):
it into the ground just about. Oh. I had a
Cadillac once, but he towed his boots with that too,
because it had a bigger engine. You know, none of
us drive around a wave with people stuff. Yeah. Yeah.
Almost thirty years ago, Hank Rowan became friends with a
man named phil to Mania Too. Manya was head of
development for the local college, Glassborough State, just down the road,
(03:52):
a little university started back in the nineteen twenties on
twenty five acres too. Many a would drop by and
see Rowan on his way up to Trenton. Everyone involved
with Glassborough and Rowan has their own version of this story,
but here's how Rowan remembered it in an interview he
gave a few years before he died. It's with Don Ferrish.
She was the former president of Glassborough State. He asked
(04:13):
Rowan how he first got involved with the college. Well,
I think we blame it all on Phil too media,
because he came to see me and asked if I
might make a donation to the scholarship fund of fifteen
hundred dollars. Well that sounded easy, fifteen hundred hundreds, So
we gave him fifteen hundred dollars. And you know what
(04:34):
he came back to many I wanted Rowan to give
money to the business school, which was pretty dilapidated. So
he pushed that for a while and I said, Phil,
I have zero interest in your school of business. What
this world needs is more engineering, how to make things
we have to produce? And Phil, what would you do
(04:57):
with one hundred million dollars? And herself off the chair?
But that's how we got to that level, and what's
the beginning. So you're the that suggested one hundred million
dollars figure you were talking about? Can I see? This
is nineteen ninety two, a generation ago. Almost nobody gave
(05:19):
donations of one hundred million dollars. Back then, this was
unheard of money. Roland's gift made headlines around the country.
He set a new standard. Did you think it changed
the world? Them? Ready? At Roland's memorial service filled too many,
it gets up and says, I think accurately that Roan
is the person who triggered what has become one of
(05:39):
the greatest explosions in educational philanthropy since the days of
Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers. From ju Why of nineteen
ninety two until the end of that decade, twenty gifts
twenty gifts of one hundred million dollars of you were
given out in this country. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy.
(06:00):
As of right now spring of twenty sixteen, we're up
to eighty seven gifts of one hundred million dollars or
more to higher education. So everyone followed Rowan's lead, except
not really. Rowan gave his money to Glasborough State College,
a public university in a sleepy little town in South
(06:22):
Jersey that no one had ever heard of. The college
was close to broke at the time. They had an
endowment of seven hundred and eighty seven thousand dollars. But
the people who followed Hank Rowan, who were inspired by
the size of his donation, almost all of them gave
money to wealthy, prestigious schools. Let me just read to
(06:43):
you the names of some of the educational institutions that
had received the largest donations in American history. Ready, in
twenty thirteen, the billionaire co founder of Nike, Phil Knight,
pledged half a billion to the Oregon Health and Science
University in Portland, Okay. Not the most prestigious institution in America.
But wait, then come three four hundred million dollar donations.
(07:08):
The first is the millionaire John Klugey's gift to Columbia
University in two thousand and seven. The second is the
hedge fund manager John Paulson's gift to Harvard University in
twenty fifteen. The third is Phil Knight's gift to Stanford
University in twenty sixteen. And after that, in order, here
are the universities that get the biggest donations. JOHNS. Hopkins,
(07:29):
Harvard again, University of Chicago, Princeton, Tufts, Carnegie, Mellon, Cornell, Yale, Penn, Claremont, McKenna,
Columbia again, Baylor, USC Columbia third time, Michigan, University of California, Wisconsin.
I could go on if you want, through all eighty seven,
but Basically, we're talking about the same wealthy, elite schools
(07:52):
getting the biggest donations again and again. Hank Rowan did
something unprecedented, and nobody followed him. This episode is the
third in my three part revisionist history miniseries re examining
the promise of higher education. The first installment was about
(08:15):
why the educational system struggles to find talented low income students.
The second episode was a comparison of Vasser in Bodin
and why it's so difficult for some colleges to find
the money for financial aid. But today I want to
talk about educational philanthropy, which I think is an issue
that doesn't get talked about early enough. Higher education in
(08:36):
the United States runs on philanthropy. There are almost no
schools that can pay their bills just on the strength
of students tuition. Those days are over. Philanthropy is what
makes the wheels turn. But there's a problem. A lot
of that philanthropy doesn't make any sense. It's going to
the wrong places for the wrong reasons. Those of you
(09:02):
who follow me on Twitter will know that I'm obsessed
with this issue. After John Paulson gave his four hundred
million dollars to Harvard and fifteen I had a kind
of Twitter melt down, sending tweet after tweet, including it
came down to helping the poor or giving the world's
richest university four undred million dollars. It doesn't need wise choice, John,
(09:22):
And then if billionaires don't step up, Harvard will soon
be down to its last thirty billion. Then when Phil
Knight gave four undred million dollars to Stanford, I got
called up for comment by The New York Times. I
said that Stamford was part of a crazy arms race
and ought to cut its endowment in half and give
the balance to schools that actually need the money. The
(09:42):
next day, I got an email from the President of Stanford,
John Hennessey. He wanted to get together and convince me
I was wrong. So I talked to him, and we'll
get to that conversation in a minute. For now, I
will only say that I was completely baffled by my
talk with Hennessey. It was as if he and I
were speaking different languages. I understand the people who give
(10:05):
money to those who need money, the people who give
money to the those who already have all the money
they need. I don't understand that what are they thinking.
Let me run an idea by you, which I think
helps to frame this question. It has to do with soccer, actually,
(10:25):
the difference between soccer and basketball. This idea comes from
two economists named David Sally and Chris Anderson, who wrote
a really great book a couple of years ago about
soccer called The Numbers Game. One of the questions they
asked was what matters more if you want to build
a great soccer team, how good your best player is
or how good your worst player is? And their answer was,
(10:48):
in soccer, what matters is how good your worst player is.
Soccer is a game where if you get a single goal,
if you just happen to be lucky, that goal may
hold up. That's David Sally, and so mistakes turn out
to be a very important part of soccer is a
team sport that leads you to think about well, mistakes
(11:09):
more often happen or more often produced by weaker players
on the pitch. Sally's argument goes like this, a soccer
team has eleven players on the field at any one time.
Suppose one is a superstar, and your worst player is
maybe only forty five percent as good as a superstar.
Because Soccer is a sport where everyone on the field
depends on everyone else. That forty five percent player can
(11:33):
make one mistake and completely negate the skill of the
best player. You can have eight beautiful passes in a row,
but if your worst player, you're forty five percent player,
botches the ninth then all the previous eight beautiful passes
are all wasted. That's right, And because of the nature
of soccer, those eight beautiful passes may have only increased
(11:53):
your likelihood of victory by a small percent, but then
it goes right back to zero because somebody turns the
ball over. Sally and Anderson did a statistical analysis. They
looked at the top soccer clubs in Europe and showed
that if those teams upgraded their poorest players instead of
their best players, they would score more goals and win
more games a lot more. Soccer is a weak link game. Yes,
(12:18):
having a better superstar was of course better, but actually
having a better end of the bench or eleventh guy
on the pitch was actually more influential to whether won
matches or not, which would be the exact opposite of basketball. Yeah,
basketball is probably the opposite end of the continuum from
if you think about. Soccer is maybe the weakest link sport.
(12:40):
Basketball is probably the most superstar different team sport that
we have. Even the greatest basketball teams often have won,
and sometimes even two players who are barely better than mediocre.
What matters in basketball is not how good your fifth
player is, It's how good your superstar is. It's a
strong link game. Think about Lionel Messi, maybe the greatest
(13:03):
soccer player of his generation, versus Michael Jordan, the greatest
basketball player of his generation. Jordan could do on a
basketball court was Jordan could guarantee or virtually guarantee that
he could get the ball. You couldn't really stop him, right.
He could go to the backcourt, pick up the ball.
He could dribble it forward. He could break double teams.
(13:23):
You could try to send three guys at him, but
then you're really you're really opening yourself up. He could
go and get a shot. Leo Messi is so good
that sometimes fun rare times where in fact he can
dribble the length of the pitch. But the fact is
that in most instances he really can't. He needs to
be He needs those eight beautiful passes to set him
(13:45):
up and then he could do something amazingly transcendent with it.
I think the weak link strong link distinction is incredibly
useful in making sense of certain kinds of problems. Suppose
I said to you, for example, here's fifty billion dollars.
(14:05):
Spend it in a way that makes air travel in
the United States more efficient. The last thing you would
do is to go to Denver, which has that big,
gorgeous new airport, and make it even bigger and even
more gorgeous. No, you go to the worst and most
crowded airports in a country, LaGuardia, Newark, Kennedy, and make
them better. Because every single day, delays at Newark and
(14:26):
LaGuardia and Kennedy ripple across the country and delay planes everywhere.
You'd spend all fifty billion dollars in New York. If
you do that, you're essentially saying air travel in the
United States is a weak link problem. We're limited by
how good our appalling New York airports are more than
by how good our best airports are. Here's another example.
(14:49):
One of the great puzzles of the Industrial Revolution is
why it began in England, why not France or Germany.
One theory is that Britain was lucky enough to have
more geniuses than anyone else, like James Watt who invents
the steam engine. But there's an economist named Joel Moker
who makes a really compelling argument that England's is that
(15:09):
it had way more craftsmen and skilled engineers and experienced
in mechanically minded backyard tinkerers than anyone else. Those were
the people who are able to take those inventions and
perfect them and make them useful. Moker is saying that
the Industrial Revolution was a weak link phenomenon, not a
strong link phenomenon, and because Britain had more craftsmen than
(15:32):
France or Germany, that gave Britain a huge advantage. So
what's Hank Rowan. Hank Roan is a weak link guy.
He wants to make a difference to make his country
a better place, and he thinks the best way to
do that is to improve the forty five percent player,
(15:52):
not the superstar. He thinks America is soccer, not basketball.
You're a graduate of MIT. Right here he is again
in the interview with Don Ferish of Glassborough State. Now,
I would assume that MIT at that time would have
been interested in receiving a gift of that size from you,
(16:12):
did you did you think about giving it to that university?
You know? Okay, they were at the time trying to
raise seven hundred and fifty million dollars, and my little
hunter Man wouldn't have made hardly any immage at all,
hardly any difference at all. That's David Sally's point about soccer.
(16:37):
Upgrading the superstar doesn't help as much as upgrading the
worst player. Here's Hank Rowan's daughter Jinny again. Basically, he
said mt had the greatest engineering school bar none. He
said it was the best education he could ever imagine.
And he said, I'm sure they would do good things
with my money, they'd build a building or do something positive.
But he said it wouldn't make the difference that it's
(16:59):
going to make down here. He said, I enjoy making
a difference in this world. So he funds an engineering
school in Glassboro. It's not the best or the fancy
engineering school in the country, but it's not supposed to be.
So it's one one four story buildings at fours, at
three it's three story building, and then it has two
wings to end these labs, we'll go walked down. I
(17:22):
went for a tour with Joe Cardona, the university's head
of PR. You know, we're in a state institution, so
a building like this was like wow, whiz bang. You know,
look it's an engineering building and so here, why don't
we just walk down the holidawn Yeah. The school was
built in the mid nineteen nineties for five hundred students.
They've now crammed seven hundred and fifty into the building
(17:43):
while they wait for a new annex to be finished
next door. Eventually they want to double the school's size.
The point is not to be more exclusive, it's to
get bigger to serve more students. Cardona and I stopped
by a lab where a group of students were working
on a Baja car, basically a home engineer dune buggy
that will race against other engineering schools on an endurance course.
(18:06):
So we got some aircraft grade aluminum. We have a
two access water jack cutter that can cut out profiles,
and we design a part that's bolted together that way.
It's nice and strong and they're granted bolt but if
it does break, you can replace individual pieces without having
to make a whole new assembly. The four students I
meet Matt, John Owen, and Kyle all grew up around here.
(18:26):
Are most of the people students in the engineering school
from New Jersey? I would say, yeah, yeah. Net tuition
in state is about nine thousand dollars a year, which
is pretty reasonable for an engineering school. Ninety five percent
get jobs in engineering when they graduate, and they really
want to do what I called a blue collar research,
(18:48):
research that is practical that people can see the tangible
result of Ali Hushman, the university's president. He's an immigrant
from Iran. He grew up in a slum in Tehran,
fifth in a family of ten. People used to ask
me to compare that said, the best comparison would be
to tell you, if you have seen slum Dog Millionaire,
you look at that this phone was twice as hard
(19:09):
and tough. Yes, we're a very close family, but very poor.
I mean poor to the extent that you would walk
in the streets without shoes. Hushman runs marathons, which is
kind of what you'd expect, right for someone who made
it out of the slums of Tehran, A typical student
at the engineering school where they from. Can you give
(19:31):
me a kind of profile of a profile of a
kid from engineering. Your father is a you know, fireman,
and a mom is a teacher. The kid has been
going to a public school. He's from fourteen miles from here,
and he's just a brilliant young men or woman gone
(19:52):
through public school and got great schools and very much focused.
He's you another word, Yes, yes, school full of alli. Yes. Yeah,
that's that's the beauty of it, Malcolm. That's why I
say it's a blue collar university. Now I'm convinced by
Ali Hushmun and by Hank Rowan. I think American society
(20:14):
really is soccer. We're so interdependent and we need so
many perfect passes to score a goal that our challenges
are weak link, not strong link. What matters is how
good our eleventh player is, not our first. We're in
a second industrial Revolution, and the lesson of this one
isn't any different from the lesson of the last one.
(20:36):
But it's really hard to get people to accept weak
link arguments. David Sally, the economist who studied soccer, says
he'll go to some billionaire oligarch who owns an English
Premier League team and say, don't spend your eighty million
pounds on one superstar player spend it on four pretty
good players at twenty million pounds each, but the oligarch
(20:59):
doesn't want to hear that. If the oligarch is only
worried about winning soccer matches, I can sell that that's believable.
Oligarchs by teams for many other reasons, including wanting to
hang out with really good looking soccer strikers and wanting
to sell a lot of shirts. A week lined strategy
(21:20):
is not going to be the most glamorous thing, and
that's the problem. Superstars are glamorous. Nobel Prize winners are glamorous.
Regional universities in rural South Jersey and solid capable midfielders
are not. What people remember are the unbelievably beautiful goals.
(21:41):
It's a brilliant run for messing goals. They may not
realize that the seven, maybe less glamorous passes that's set
up that eighth beautiful through ball were maybe arguably just
as important, but they were much more mundane and they
just involved simple movement to open spaces, and people don't
(22:04):
adequately value that. When we asked ourselves the question, what
could Stanford do to make a better contribution to the world,
we quickly converged on building a scholarship program that would
bring the most talented students and prepare them to be
leaders in the world, to lead on attacking the important problem.
(22:26):
John Hennessy, president of Stanford University since two thousand, widely
considered one of the greatest presidents in Stanford history. As
I began to think about the end of my term
as president, I started to think, was there something else
perhaps we could do where we could build on everything
(22:47):
we've put in place at Stanford and offer something that
would be a great thing for the world. Not long
before we talked, I took a walk across the Stanford
campus and it's like entering a shrine to higher education.
Everything is gleaming, gorgeous, groomed green. That's all Hennessy's work.
(23:09):
He's transformed the school, doubled the endowment from eleven to
twenty two billion dollars, made it into maybe the greatest
university in the world. When we talked, he was just
about to retire and thinking about his legacy. Many people,
myself included, became increasingly concerned about what we saw as
(23:30):
a void in great leadership around the world, in the
public sector as well as in the private sector. Hennessy
decided he wanted to start a graduate program kind of
like the Rhodes Scholarship. Every year, it would bring one
hundred of the brightest, most accomplished college grads from around
the world to Stanford and let them apply their minds
(23:51):
to the problems of the world. He goes to his deans,
then his trustees. Everyone loves the idea, and then over
the summer last summer, I went to Phil Knight and
explained the idea to him, and he was enthusiastic about
it and came back a month later and said he'd
help us make it happen. Remember, Phil Knight is the
co founder of Nike, a billionaire many times over, and
(24:14):
a serious philanthropist. How did you pick Phil Knight as
someone to approach? Was he the first person you approached?
I knew Phil had been concerned about leadership globally. He
and I had had a good working relationship. So he
ends up giving four hundred million. How does what arrive
at that number? Is that a number you suggested to him?
It's roughly half. I mean where our goal is somewhere
(24:36):
in the seven fifty to eight hundred to implement the
entire program secure it permanently, and so I think in
the past finding a naming gift that of that scale
is probably necessary, and then you can find gifts to
fill in the rest of it. It was my criticism
of the phil Knight donation that led Hennessy to get
in touch with me. He wanted to explain his thinking,
(25:00):
which is John Hennessy wants to do a great thing
for the world, So he sets up an eight hundred
million dollar graduate program for one hundred elites to He's
the anti Rowan, right, Hank Rowan wanted to start at
the bottom and tries to lift as many people up
as possible. Hennessy starts at the top and lavishes eight
(25:21):
hundred million on the most exclusive group he can find.
Rohan is a week Link guy. His world is soccer.
Hennessy is playing basketball and he wants to focus his
billions on the superstars. In the time you've been at Stanford,
that went from what from eleven to twenty two? Is that? Right? Yeah?
Probably about eleven to twenty two? Right. Most of that
(25:44):
endowment returns not mostly gifts, but there's some gifts in
there too. Obviously, what is uh, how much is enough
for institution, Linke Stanford, how much is enough? I think
we if our ambitions don't grow, then I think you
(26:04):
do reach a point where you have enough money, and
I would hope that our ambitions for what we want
to do as an institution, both and our teaching and
our research grow. In other words, there really isn't such
a thing at Stanford as enough money. The school's ambitions
(26:25):
are always growing, so it's endowment should too. Just because
you already have more resources than almost anyone else doesn't
mean you should stop collecting even more resources. Hennessey is
a hardcore strong linker. Hypothetically, if you know Bill Gates
or Larry Ellison came to you and said, I'm giving
(26:46):
you ten billion dollars, I'm retiring and I'm giving it all.
My will says everything goes to Stanford. I mean, would
you say we don't know, we don't need it, or
would you say we can put that money to good use. Well,
first of all, I don't think either either Larry Ellison
(27:06):
or Bill Gates is going to give me ten billion
dollars unless I tell them exactly what I'm going to
do with it and how I'm going to make it
a good investment. And since I know both I know
both of them, I can tell you they won't they
won't do it. Could you make an argument to Larry
Allison as you could put if he gave you ten billion,
you could put it to good use ten billion just
(27:27):
to put us in the ballpark. Because I worry sometimes
that Americans get a little jaded about big numbers. Ten
billion is a few billion more than the gross domestic
product of Barbados, and four billion shy of the gross
domestic product of Jamaica. Basically, I'm asking what would happen
if someone gave you Stanford the average economic output of
(27:50):
an entire Caribbean country for a year, tax free. By
the way, the guy who gives the ten billion gets
to write it off, and every dollar Stanford earns on
that ten billion, they get to keep ten billion. I'd
have to do something really dramatic for ten billion dollars,
really dramatic. He thinks about it for a moment. Actually
(28:12):
I counted for about two seconds. Then he comes up
with something really dramatic. The one area where I think
there is an opportunity for significant incremental funding is in
the biomedical sciences. If that were an endowment, for example,
so you're throwing out a half a billion dollars a year.
(28:34):
I could find a way to spend a half a
billion dollars a year in biomedical research ten billion. He
could totally use another ten billion. At this point, I'm
just curious. I mean, I've read about strong length thinkers
in books, but I've never actually talked with one before.
(28:55):
So I keep posing more and more far fetched scenarios.
Do you ever imagine that a president of Stanford might
go to a funder and say, at this point in
our history, the best use of your money is to
give to the UC system, not to Stanford. The UC
system is the University of California system ten schools Berkeley, UCLA,
(29:16):
San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbara, etc. Maybe the finest group
of public universities in the world. If you listen to
the previous episode of Revisionist History, the one about Vasser,
I talked about the New York Times Access Index. It's
a ranking of one hundred and eighty universities in the
US according to how good a job they do in finding, educating,
(29:37):
and financially supporting low income students. Right now, Vasser comes
in eighth well six of the first seven spots on
that list. Our University of California schools. Stanford has sixteen
thousand students. The UC system has two hundred and thirty
eight thousand students. So I'm asking John Hennessy, might there
(29:59):
ever ever be an instance where he might tell a
would be super philanthropist. Look, we've already got twenty two
billion dollars in the bank, higher than the output of
two Caribbean countries, and it's earning us a couple of
tax free billions every year. Your dollar would go further
at the public institutions down the street, since they educate
(30:22):
two hundred and twenty two thousand more students than we
do with a fraction of the endowment. I'm not holding
Hennessey to his answer. I'm not looking for him to
make a solemn pledge. I'm just asking, well, that would
be a hard thing to do, obviously, to turn them
turn them away. And I think the other question we'd
(30:45):
be asked is how can I have confidence that they'll
use my money well, which we're obviously the president of
Stanford is not in a position to vouch for I
think now I realize he has institutional loyalties he's the
head of Stanford, and I must say I like Tennessee.
But am I the only one who finds his answer
(31:05):
ridiculous even offensive? He's suggesting that he can't guarantee that
the UC system may be the most successful and socially
progressive public university system in the world. He can't guarantee
they would use that money well as opposed to what
as opposed to spending eight hundred million dollars on a
(31:27):
boutique graduate program for one hundred elite students a year.
That kind of using money, Well, it is the pre
eminent scholarship program. You'll get the best and brightest young
men and women from around the world who will receive
a graduate education at the world's best university when this
program is established. That's the promotional video for the scholarship fund.
(31:47):
You just heard Phil Knight talking about it. You can
watch all four minutes and twenty three seconds of it
at revisionist history dot com. It's impressive, lots of drone
aerial shots of Stanford's spotless, palm lined avenues. But let's
do the math on the scholarship. Hennessy's plan is to
(32:07):
fund it from the proceeds of investing eight hundred million dollars.
It's an endowment. The usual rule of thumb is that
an endowment gives you about five percent a year, so
forty million dollars and with one hundred students a year
in a three year program, that comes out to one
hundred and thirty three thousand dollars per student. One hundred
and thirty three thousand dollars per student per year. Our
(32:31):
precious medals also involved helicopters. Are they doing this on
a beach at Saint Bart's. When Hennessey announced this scholarship,
he gave an example of the kind of issues that
perhaps these mega scholars could tackle. He thought that they
could look at the effects of the hundred million dollars
gift that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave to the
New Jersey public school system. Newark historically has some of
(32:55):
the worst public schools in the country, and I guess
the reason Hennessey thought Suckerberg's gift needed to be studied
was that there's a feeling among some that the donation
hasn't had quite the impact people thought it might. This
is the exact quote Hennessy gave to The New York
Times nobody understood the real difficulty in making significant change
(33:16):
in the public education system. The first thing that the
strong Link guy wants to do with his crack team
of eight hundred million dollars scholars is critiqued the weak
Link decision to spend one hundred million dollars on poor kids.
A billionaire gives a fortune to an elite school in
order to understand why another billionaire's donation to a poor
(33:39):
school isn't working out? And what if Stanford's mega million
dollars scholars can't answer that question, should another billionaire give
even more money to an even more elite school to
answer the question of why the four hundred million dollars
a gift to study the one hundred million dollars gift
hasn't worked out. Please stop me before I tweet again.
(34:04):
I'm not saying that the strong Link approach is never appropriate.
I grew up in Canada in the nineteen seventies and
at that time the country had lots of good universities,
but there was a feeling that what the country needed
was at least one world class science in technology university.
So they created that the University of Waterloo, and it
was a great idea. But the United States today is
(34:28):
not Canada in the nineteen seventies. It does not suffer
from an excess of egalitarianism. It suffers from the opposite problem.
Its strong links have never been stronger. And when you
make strong link arguments at a time like now, you
end up sounding ridiculous. Just listen. February twenty fourteen, the
(34:53):
billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin gives one hundred and
fifty million dollars to Harvard. It's to support Harvard's financial
aid program. Here's what the president of Harvard says. Ken
Griffin's extraordinary philanthropy is opening Harvard's gate. It's wider to
the most talented students in the world, no matter their
economic circumstances. And here's what Ken Griffin says. My goal
(35:19):
with this gift is to make sure and this is
the exact quote, that our nation's best and brightest have
continued access to this outstanding institution. Now, let me remind you,
at the time of Griffin's gift, Harvard had an endowment
of thirty six billion dollars. So a billionaire gives one
(35:39):
hundred and fifty million to an institution that has an
endowment of thirty six billion, because he thinks the school
needs help opening its gates wider to the most talented
students in the world. Because he's worried that thirty six
billion might not be enough to ensure continued access to
this outstanding institution. These two comments were not off the
(36:02):
cough remarks. I'm reading them from the official Harvard press release.
Trained professionals perfected those quotes. Smart Harvard educated people approved them.
They probably sat down in teams around a long oak
antique conference table dating back to the eighteen hundreds and
came up with what they thought was the most compelling
(36:22):
justification for why giving another one hundred and fifty million
dollars to Harvard is a good idea? Is that the
best they could come up with. We're talking because I,
as you know, have been critical of some of the
I'm part of the backlash. I guess back to my
conversation with John Hennessy of Stanford, and I'm just curious
(36:43):
about whether how common or how often do you run
into two backlash to people saying enough with some of
these large Am I a lonely voice or is this
something that you have encountered a lot and think about
a lot. We don't encounter it a lot. I would say,
(37:05):
I think the reason we probably don't encounter it is
that we um don't view this as who gets the
biggest slice of pie here? We view it as, um,
what can we do? What can we do to that's transformative?
How can we increase our contributions of the world. I
(37:27):
mentioned maybe the most obvious criticism of what Stanford is doing,
and he says, we don't encounter it a lot. Apparently
the President of Stanford only encounters people who look at
American higher education and conclude that what it really needs
is more money at the top. With all due respect,
the President of Stanford needs to get out more. Take
(37:50):
a little trip to Glassborough, New Jersey, to the campus
of what's now called Rowan University. Maybe take a look
at the statue up front. Everything you've been listening to
(38:15):
Revisionist History, sometimes the past deserves a second chance. If
you like what you've heard, we'd love it. If you
rate us on iTunes, it helps a lot. You can
find more information about this and other episodes at revisionist
history dot com or on your favorite podcast app. Our
show is produced by Meilabal, Roxane Scott and Jacob Smith.
(38:38):
Our editor is Julia Barton. Music is composed by Luis
Guerra and Taka yazoo Zawa. Flawn Williams is our engineer.
Fact checker Michelle Sarroca. Thanks to the Penalty Management team
Laura Mayor, Andy Bowers and Jacob Weisberg. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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