The article is a critical essay examining Johns Hopkins University's resource allocation priorities, questioning whether educational investment in scholar training has been displaced by architectural expenditure. The content advocates for intellectual freedom and educational access through its publication on an open-access platform committed to public discourse, ideas, and scholarship. While the piece engages substantially with Article 19 (free expression) and Article 26 (education), it is narrowly focused on institutional critique rather than broader human rights analysis.
> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants.
I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.
Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
If you’ve ever read science fiction about life in the ruins of an advanced culture, but you were irritated with how it skimmed over what the process of the fall was like— well, we sure have a wealth of those details now.
"Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue."
I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.
> He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium.
They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students.
It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
I misread the title as "The Missuses of the University" and thought this might be the next iteration on the "Real Housewives" franchise: "Real Housewives of the University".
Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.
Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness:
> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.
These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either.
"Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related.
I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?
"Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy."
"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."
Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.
What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?
A wise man once told me that a company or organization has enough professors or high level academics they must also run the show. They won't like it but they have to. You shouldn't have a layer above and pretend they know better. They will inflate the importance of stuff they can understand and ignore everything important.
Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education:
1. Old and expensive to maintain land
2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty)
3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club)
It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education
The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone
As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed
Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society.
From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else.
And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
> The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.
I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.
I blame the "contest" started by the magazine US News and World Report, which started their college rating. This led to university execs aiming to raise their rating at the expense of education. Higher rankings meant higher bonuses for top employees - especially the president of the university. This race for ratings is why the cost of a university education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation.
Business school professors are professors. They've never run any business. They can train MBA students to get hired and promoted. They can keep their own personal money in S&P500 index funds. That's about it.
(EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)
I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall.
Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble.
This is probably true since at least WW2 but isn't the central idea that Professors closest to cutting edge research can do the most interesting teaching?
If you want the best teachers you can always go to Liberal Arts Colleges where this isn't really an issue.
my youngest son visited a handful of "fancy" schools near the end of highschool and he thought the whole process was nuts.
he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."
Journalists were asking for the bombed car of journalist Jon Bolles to be removed? Murdered while he was defending the public interest against the mafia?
As the article states, the funds came from an external donor.
It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).
Professors at schools like this do not view these places as about teaching students. Academics, to include performing research in their field and publishing the results, yes, and the students get in the way of that.
The "deal" often being made with academia is "we'll give you a place to do research, and even fund your research, but you have to teach the next generation." This isn't a bad deal, and is the reason many scientists give up MUCH larger paychecks that they'd get from the private sector to be a professor. These people would rather do research than have a more directed engineering (or engineering research) role that the private sector would give them.
But that deal has also shifted. Duties have changed and often many of the academics do not get to do much research, instead being managers of grad students who do the research. Being a professor is a lot of work and it is a lot of bureaucratic work.
I'm not sure why you're complaining about researchers. Think about the system for a second. We've trained people for years to be researchers and then... make them managers. Imagine teaching people to program, then once you've decided they're fully trained and good programmers we say "you're free to do all the programming you want! But you have to also teach more programmers, grade their work, create their assignments and tests, mentor the advanced programmers, help them write papers, help them navigate the university system, write grants to ensure you have money for those advanced programmers, help manage your department's organization, and much more." This is even more true for early career academics who don't have tenure[0]. For the majority of professors the time they have to continue doing research (the thing which they elected to train to do! That they spent years honing! That they paid and/or gave up lots of money for!) is nights and weekends. And that's a maybe since the above tasks usually don't fit in a 40hr work week. My manager at a big tech company gets more time to do real programming work than my advisor did during my PhD.
I'd also mention that research has a lot of monetary value. I'm not sure why this is even questioned by some people. Research lays the foundation for all the rest. Sure, a lot of it fails, but is that surprising when you're trying to push the bounds of human knowledge? Yet it is far worth it because there are singular discoveries/inventions that create more economic value than decades worth of the current global economy. It's not hard to recognize that since basically the entire economy is standing on that foundation...
[0] Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you don't have a lab full of graduate students who need to graduate.
The article is a critical essay engaging public discourse about institutional practices. Its publication in a magazine committed to intellectual freedom and scholarship demonstrates advocacy for public discourse and expression of ideas.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The article is published openly on publicbooks.org without apparent paywall or subscription requirement.
Public Books describes itself as 'a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship,' explicitly positioning intellectual expression as its core function.
The article byline clearly identifies author Morgan Barry, supporting attribution and journalistic transparency.
Inferences
Open publication of critical analysis demonstrates structural commitment to free expression and public discourse.
The magazine's self-definition as a forum for ideas directly supports Article 19's protection of expression.
Author attribution supports accountability in expression.
The article critiques institutional priorities regarding educational investment and scholarly training. It implicitly advocates for education as a primary institutional purpose and challenges resource allocation away from education toward infrastructure.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The article directly questions whether funds 'might have trained the next generation of scholars' have been redirected to 'ostentatious new buildings.'
Content is published openly without subscription or paywall requirements, making ideas and scholarship accessible to general public.
The publication identifies education and scholarship as core institutional values.
Inferences
The article's focus on educational investment as an institutional priority reflects advocacy for right to education.
Open publication model structurally supports universal access to ideas and intellectual content.
Critiquing diversion of educational funds implicitly champions education as fundamental right.
The article engages with cultural and intellectual life by analyzing university practices and their role in fostering scholarship. It advocates for participation in scientific and cultural progress through institutional prioritization.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The article discusses university role in training scholars and advancing intellectual work.
Publication platform explicitly includes 'arts' and 'scholarship' in its mission statement.
Content is freely accessible, enabling broad public participation in cultural discourse.
Inferences
The article's engagement with scholarly priorities reflects concern for participation in intellectual culture.
The platform's commitment to arts and scholarship supports cultural participation rights.
Open access structurally democratizes participation in cultural discourse.
The article frames university resource allocation as a moral and civic concern, invoking implicit principles of dignity and justice. References to 'training the next generation of scholars' and contrasting priorities suggest foundational commitment to human flourishing.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The headline poses a critical question about university fund allocation: 'Have the funds that might have trained the next generation of scholars...have been blown on ostentatious new buildings?'
The article is published by Public Books, which self-identifies as 'a magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship.'
Inferences
The framing of educational investment versus architectural expenditure reflects underlying concern for equitable distribution of institutional resources.
The article's platform and framing signal commitment to intellectual discourse about institutional responsibility.
Article addresses institutional practices that may implicitly engage with equality principles, though the piece is primarily analytical rather than explicitly normative about human dignity.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
The article examines specific institutional decisions at Johns Hopkins University regarding resource allocation.
Inferences
By scrutinizing differential resource allocation, the piece implicitly engages with principles of equal treatment within institutions.
The article content itself does not explicitly discuss privacy, but the presence of Google Tag Manager tracking on the page represents behavioral data collection without explicit on-page consent mechanism visible.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Google Tag Manager tracking code (GTM-WZXPWVR) is present in the page source.
No observable cookie consent banner or privacy opt-in notice is visible in the provided page content.
Inferences
The tracking implementation suggests behavioral data collection occurs without visible user control mechanism.
Absence of visible consent interface suggests privacy considerations may not be prominently foregrounded in site design.
The article is published without paywall or subscription barrier, enabling open access to editorial content. The platform explicitly positions itself as facilitating public intellectual discourse.
Public Books' open-access model and intellectual mission structurally support universal access to educational content and ideas. No paywall restricts access to scholarship.
Public Books' mission as a 'magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship' structurally supports participation in cultural and intellectual life. Open access enables broader participation.
Google Tag Manager tracking script is embedded in page code, enabling analytics/advertising tracking of user behavior without observable opt-in consent interface on the page.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 13:57:54 UTC
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