Its student orientation week at Stanford. The streets are lined with map-wielding parents and students waving banners that say “Welcome to Stanny !!” and such-like. The arrival of students seems to have increased the black population of Palo Alto greatly (from zilch to a weeny bit) which is an interesting and pleasant surprise. The Stanford Daily has re-started, and I picked this up on the way to grab some coffee. First article right up there at the top was about two Senators trying to investigate how much money Rich Universities really have and whether they should be spending rather than hoarding.
It seems that Stanford’s endowments total $17.2 billion.
I came over all queasy.
I think that’s even bigger than Harvard’s pot full of filthy lucre ?
Oh, so … what would you do with $17.2 billion dollars ????
The e-Astronomer 
A Google search suggests that Stanford is no.3 behind Harvard and Yale.
One hopes that it’s not all invested with Lehmann Brothers
I’m not even sure what you could do with a big endowment!
It’s a start, right?
(I mean, as long as they don’t offer dependent health care. Or Caltrain passes for grad students. Or affordable grad student housing.)
Big endowment eh? kyuk kyuk
Are there still string quartets in Palo Alto composed of out-of-work tech workers? There were the last time I was there. And if you’re looking for black people locally, you could always try *East* Palo Alto… property is still cheap there…
For the curious: Harvard’s endowment is just shy of $37 billion.
That’s enough for an LHC, several ELT’s, a fleet of JWST’s and still have money leftover to buy the assets of a distressed investment bank.
Assuming you could convince the other faculties that they don’t need the money that is…