What a waste!

[pegkerr]

There was an article in the Star Tribune today, a nice little feel good piece about grateful alum gives the University of Minnesota a huge gift. It's the largest gift in the University's 152 year history. $35 million dollars. He's so grateful because the University "turned his life around." Everyone at the U is gushing with gratitude.

And what is that $35 million going to be spent on?

A football stadium.

That's right. With state budget cuts hacking and slashing the University's budget, with the skyrocketing cost of tuition making the dream of going to college increasingly impossible to achieve for more and more families, this unbelievably generous gift is going to be devoted to building a temple of concrete so that people can sit on their duffs and watch a bunch of grown men kick an inflated bladder of pig skin around.

Comments

[carbonel]

What I want to know is if it's really true that Carleton had an endowment to provide ice cream at meals -- that was the story I heard when I was there.

With the benefit of hindsight, something that would have been exceedingly useful to me when I was there was something that would model the experience of being in the business world. I had always thought I would hate it, and made many of my choices based on avoiding it. It turned out that it suited me much better than I had expected -- better than most of the possible careers I had planned. But how can you provide something like that just by throwing money at it?

(Carleton class of 1978)

[minervacat.livejournal.com]

(Totally random, sorry. But I couldn't resist.)

Hi. Carleton '02 here. And despite working in the Archives for 6 months, I can never prove nor disprove the ice cream story, though when I graduated, they still provided ice cream at every meal.