Revisionist History - My Little Hundred Million

Episode Date: July 21, 2016

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? To learn more about the topics covered in this episode, visit www.RevisionistHistory.com Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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 Rowan came to Glassboro, he was mobbed like a rock star, which probably embarrassed him because he wasn't given to those kinds of displays. When Hank Rowan died in December of 2015, 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. So I'll tell you all about it when I see you again. Let me tell you. When I see you again. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. 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. Why Hank Rowan's example didn't spread beyond Glassboro, New Jersey. He was 6'1", or so, not a huge football player size, and, you know, 180 pounds, you know, thin but not skinny, and had a loud voice, strong presence, and, yeah, he was... What was his management style like? Benevolent dictator, I think.

That's Rowan's daughter, Ginny Smith. She now runs the company her father started in 1953. It's called Inductotherm. It's right off the New Jersey turnpike. They make industrial furnaces for melting metal. 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,

and now some of them are 50-ton. They're just huge. And he kept branching out and acquired some companies, and it kind of grew like Topsy, but he also worked very, very hard at it and hired good people. Rowan built Inducto Therm 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 would run around in scuffed shoes and trousers, not worried about that. He didn't care how he dressed or looked. Rowan was an engineer, raced sailboats, flew planes, believed in hard work, 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 poo-pooed Mercedes because Mercedes wasn't one of our customers. What did he drive sort of near the near? He drove Oldsmobiles and Buicks and finally the company here in Mississippi driver Lincoln. He drove it into the ground just about oh it had a Cadillac once but

he towed his boats with that too, because it had a bigger engine, you know. None of us drive around and wave at people. Yeah, yeah. Almost 30 years ago, Hank Rowan became friends with a man named Phil Tuminea. Tuminea was head of development for the local college, Glassboro State, just down the road. A little university started back in the 1920s on 25 acres. Tumini would drop by and see Rowan on his way up to Trenton. Everyone involved with Glassboro 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 Farish, who's the former

president of Glassboro State. He asked Rowan how he first got involved with the college. Well, I think we blame it all on Phil Tumidia, because he came to see me and asked if I might make a donation to the scholarship fund of $1,500. Well, that sounded easy, $1,500. So we gave him $1,500. And you know what? 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 with $100 million? And he nearly fell off the chair. But that's how we got to that level, and that was the beginning. So you're the one that suggested the $100 million figure? Oh yeah, he was talking about 10. I see.

This is 1992, a generation ago. Almost nobody gave donations of $100 million back then. This was unheard of money. Rowan's gift made headlines around the country. He set a new standard. Did you think it changed the world? Damn right it did. At Rowan's memorial service, Phil Tumina gets up and says, I think

accurately, that Rowan is the person who triggered what has become one of the greatest explosions in educational philanthropy since the days of Andrew Carnegie and the Rockefellers. From July of 1992 until the end of that decade, 20 gifts, 20 gifts of $100 million or more were given out in this country. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, as of right now, spring of 2016, we're up to 87 gifts of $100 million or more to higher education. So everyone followed Rowan's lead. Except, not really. Rowan gave his money to Glasper Estate College, a public university in a sleepy little town in South Jersey that no one had ever heard of. The college was close to broke. At the time, they had an endowment of $787,000. 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

you the names of some of the educational institutions that have received the largest donations in American history. Ready? In 2013, 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 $400 million donations. The first is the billionaire John Kluge's gift to Columbia University in 2007. The second is the hedge fund manager John Paulson's gift to Columbia University in 2007. The second is the hedge fund manager John Paulson's gift to Harvard University in 2015. The third is Phil Knight's gift to Stanford University in 2016. And after that, in order, here are the universities that get the biggest donations. Johns Hopkins, Harvard again, University of Chicago, Princeton, Tufts, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Yale, Penn, Claremont McKenna,

Columbia again, Baylor, USC, Columbia a third time, Michigan, University of California, Wisconsin. I could go on if you want, through all 87, but basically we're talking about the same wealthy elite schools 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 why the educational system struggles to find talented low-income students. The second episode was a comparison of Vassar and Bowdoin 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 nearly enough. Higher education in 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 who follow me on Twitter will know that I'm obsessed with this issue.

After John Paulson gave his $400 million to Harvard in 2015, I had a kind of Twitter meltdown, sending tweet after tweet, including, it came down to helping the poor or giving the world's richest university $400 million it doesn't need. Wise choice, John. And then, if billionaires don't step up, Harvard will soon be down to its last $30 billion. Then when Phil Knight gave $400 million to Stanford, I got called up for comment by the New York Times. I said that Stanford 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 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 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 Hennessy. It was as if he and I were speaking different languages. I understand the people who give money to those who need money. The people who give money to 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, the difference between soccer and basketball. This idea comes from two economists named David Salley and Chris Anderson, who wrote a really great book a couple 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, 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 Salley. And so mistakes turn out to be a very important part of soccer as a team sport. That leads you to think about, well, mistakes more often happen or more often produced by weaker players on the pitch. Salley's argument goes like this. A soccer team has 11 players on the field at any one time. Suppose one is a superstar. And your worst player is maybe only 45% as good as the superstar. Because soccer is a sport where everyone on the field depends on everyone else,

that 45% player can make one mistake and completely negate the skill of the best player. You could have eight beautiful passes in a row, but if your worst player, your 45% 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 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, having a better superstar was of course better, but actually having a better end of the bench or 11th guy on the pitch was actually more

influential to whether you won matches or not. Which would be the exact opposite of basketball. Yeah. Basketball is probably the opposite end of the continuum. If you think about soccer as maybe the weakest link sport, basketball is probably the most superstar-driven team sport that we have. Even the greatest basketball teams often have one, 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 soccer player of his generation, versus Michael Jordan, the greatest basketball player of his generation. What 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. You could try to send three guys at him, but then you're really opening yourself up. He could go and get a shot. Leo Messi is so good that sometimes, 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 up.

And then he can 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 $50 billion. 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'd go to the worst and most crowded airports in the country, LaGuardia, Newark, Kennedy, and make them better. Because every single day, delays at Newark and LaGuardia and Kennedy ripple across the country and delay planes everywhere.

You'd spend all $50 billion 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. 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 Mocher who makes a really compelling argument that England's advantage is that it had way more craftsmen and skilled engineers and experienced and mechanically-minded backyard tinkerers than anyone else. Those were the people who were able to take those inventions and perfect them and make them useful.

Mocher is saying that the Industrial Revolution was a weak-link phenomenon, not a strong-link phenomenon. And because Britain had more craftsmen than France or Germany, that gave Britain a huge advantage. So what's Hank Rowan? Hank Rowan 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 45% player, 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 Farish

of Glassboro State. Now, I would assume that MIT at that time would have been interested in receiving a gift of that size from you? Did you think about giving it to that university? No. Okay. They were at the time trying to raise $750 million. And my little $100 million wouldn't have made hardly any difference at all. Hardly any difference at all. That's David Salley's point about soccer. Upgrading the superstar doesn't help as much as upgrading the worst player. Here's Hank Rowan's daughter Ginny again.

Basically, he said MIT 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 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 fanciest engineering school in the country, but it's not supposed to be.

So it's one four-story building? Is it four or is it three? It's a three-story building, and then it has two wings to it, and there's labs. We'll go walk down. I went for a tour with Joe Cardona, the university's head of PR.

You know, we're 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 hall down this way? The school was built in the mid-1990s for 500 students. They've now crammed 750 into the building 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-engineered dune buggy that will race against other engineering schools on an endurance course. So we got some aircraft-grade aluminum, and we have a two-axis water jet cutter that can cut out profiles. And we designed a part that's bolted together. That way, it's nice and strong, and we designed a part that's bolted together.

That way, it's nice and strong, and they're graded bolts, but if it does break, you can replace individual pieces without having to make a whole new assembly. The four students I meet, Matt, Sean, Owen, and Kyle, all grew up around here. Are most of the students in the engineering school from New Jersey? I would say the majority, but not all of them. Net tuition in-state is about $9,000 a year, which is pretty reasonable for an engineering school. 95% get jobs in engineering when they graduate.

And we really want to do what I call a blue-collar research, research that is practical, that people can see the tangible result of. Ali Houshman, 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 it. I said the best comparison would be to tell you if you have seen Slumdog Millionaire, you look at that, this one was twice as hard and tough.

Oh, wow. Yes. We are a very close family, but very poor. I mean, poor to the extent that you walk in the streets without shoes. Houshman 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 are they from? Can you give me a kind of profile of it? A profile of a kid from engineering a father is a you know fireman mom is a teacher the kid has been going to a public school

he's from 40 miles from here and he's just a brilliant young man or woman gone through public school and got great scores and very much focused he's you in other words school full of Ali that's the beauty of it that's why I say it's a blue collar university now I'm convinced by Ali Houshman and by Hank Rowan

I think American society 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 11th 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. But it's really hard to get people to accept weak link arguments.

David Salley, 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 80 million pounds on one superstar player. Spend it on four pretty good players at 20 million pounds each. But the oligarch doesn't want to hear that. If the oligarch is only worried about winning soccer matches,

I can sell that. That's believable. Oligarchs buy 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 weak-linked strategy 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. They may not realize that the seven maybe less glamorous passes that 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 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.

John Hennessey, president of Stanford University since 2000, 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 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. He's transformed the school, doubled the endowment from $11 to $22 billion,

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 a void in great leadership around the world, in the public sector as well as in the private sector. Hennessey decided he wanted to start a graduate program, kind of like the Rhodes Scholarship. Every year, it would bring 100 of the brightest, most accomplished college grads from around the world to Stanford

and let them apply their minds 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 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 $400 million. How does one arrive at that number? Is that a number you suggested to him? It's roughly half. I mean, our goal is somewhere in the $750 to $800 to implement the entire

program, secure it permanently. And so I think in the past, finding a naming gift 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, which is, John Hennessy wants to do a great thing for the world. So he sets up an $800 million graduate program for 100 elite students. 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 $800 million on the most exclusive group he can find.

Rowan is a weak 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, the endowment went from what, from 11 to 22? Is that right? Yeah, probably about 11 to 22. Right. Most of that's endowment returns, not mostly gifts, but there's some gifts in there too, obviously. What is, what's, how much is enough for an institution like Stanford? How much is enough?

I think we, if our ambitions don't grow, then I think you 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 in 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 are always growing, so its endowment should too.

Just because you already have more resources than almost anyone else doesn't mean you should stop collecting even more resources. Hennessy is a hardcore strong linker. Hypothetically, if, you know, Bill Gates or Larry Ellison came to you and said, I'm giving you $10 billion. 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 Larry Ellison or Bill Gates is going to give me $10 billion unless I tell them exactly what I'm going to do with it and how I'm going to make it a good investment. Since I know both of them, I can tell you they won't do it. Could you make an argument to Larry Ellison that if he gave you $10 billion, you could put it to good use? $10 billion. Just to put us in the ballpark,

because I worry sometimes that Americans get a little jaded about big numbers, $10 billion is a few billion more than the gross domestic product of Barbados and $4 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 an entire Caribbean country for a year? Tax-free, by the way. The guy who gives the $10 billion gets to write it off, and every dollar Stanford earns on that $10 billion, they get to keep. $10 billion, I'd have to do something really dramatic for $10 billion.

Really dramatic. He thinks about it for a moment. Actually, 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, I could find a way to spend a half a billion dollars a year in biomedical research. 10 billion. He could totally use another 10 billion. At this point, I'm just curious. I mean, I've read about strong link thinkers in books, but I've never actually talked with one before. 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, San Diego system is the University of California system. 10 schools, Berkeley, UCLA, San Diego, Davis, Santa Barbara, etc. may be the finest group of public universities in the world. If you listened to the previous episode of Revisionist History, the one about Vassar, I talked about the New York Times Access Index. It's a ranking of 180 universities in the

U.S. according to how good a job they do in finding, educating, and financially supporting low-income students. Right now, Vassar comes in eighth. Well, six of the first seven spots on that list are University of California schools. Stanford has 16,000 students. The UC system has 238,000 students. So I'm asking John Hennessey, might there ever, ever be an instance where he might tell a would-be super philanthropist, look, we've already got $22 billion 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 222,000 more students than we do with a fraction of the endowment. I'm not holding Hennessy 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 away. And I think the other question we'd 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 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 $800 million on a boutique graduate program for 100 elite students a year? That kind of using money well? It is the preeminent 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. You just heard Phil Knight talking about it. You can watch all four minutes and 23 seconds of it at revisionisthistory.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 fund it from the proceeds of investing $800 million. It's an endowment. The usual rule of thumb is that an endowment gives you about 5% a year, so $800 million. It's an endowment. The usual rule of thumb is that an endowment gives you about 5% a year, so $40 million. And with 100 students a year in a three-year program, that comes out to $133,000 per student. $133,000 per student per year.

Are precious metals also involved? Helicopters? Are they doing this on a beach at St. Barts? per student per year. Are precious metals also involved? Helicopters? Are they doing this on a beach at St. Barts? When Hennessy 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 $100 million gift

that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave to the Newark, New Jersey public school system. Newark historically has some of the worst public schools in the country. And I guess the reason Hennessy thought Zuckerberg'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 in the public education system. The first thing that the strong link guy

wants to do with his crack team of 800 million dollar scholars is critique the weak link decision to spend 100 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 school isn't working out. And what if Stanford's mega-million-dollar 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 $400 million gift to study the $100 million gift hasn't worked out? Please stop me before I tweet again. I'm not saying that the strong link approach is never appropriate. I grew up in Canada in the 1970s, 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 and technology university. So they created that, the University of Waterloo, and it was a great idea. But the United States today is not Canada in the 1970s. 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 2014. The billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin gives $150 million 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 gates wider to the most talented students in the world, no matter their economic circumstances. And here's what Ken Griffin says. My goal 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 $36 billion. So a billionaire gives $150 million to an institution that has an endowment of $36 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 $36 billion might not be enough to ensure continued access to this outstanding institution. These two comments were not off-the-cuff 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 1800s and came up with what they thought was the most compelling justification for why giving another $150 million 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. I'm just curious about whether... How common or how often do you run into 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 I think the reason we probably don't encounter it is that we don't view this as who gets the biggest slice of pie here. We view it as what can we do that's transformative? How can we increase our contribution to the world?

I 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 a little trip to Glassboro, New Jersey, to the campus of what's now called Rowan University. Maybe take a look at the statue up front. You've been listening to Revisionist History.

Sometimes the past deserves a second chance. If you like what you've heard, we'd love it if you'd rate us on iTunes. It helps a lot. You can find more information about this and other episodes at revisionisthistory.com or on your favorite podcast app. Our show is produced by Mia Lobel, Roxanne Scott, and Jacob Smith. Thank you. Thanks to the Panoply management team, Laura Mayer, Andy Bowers, and Jacob Weisberg.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell.