Tag Archives: Reed College

by - 0 comments

Oregon Higher Education Endowments Under Threat

For Donald Trump, it’s always about the filthy lucre. 

Rewarding allies and punishing perceived adversaries financially has long been Trump’s raison d’être in business and politics. His life is a story of questionable real estate and tax payment shenanigans, a sham Trump University, hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and misuse of charitable funds at the Trump Foundation. His greed and shameless behavior seem to have no limits. Nor does his assault on higher education.

Now he and his party are after higher education endowments and Oregon’s private institutions, including those with large and small endowments, should be worried.

Reed College has the largest endowment among Oregon’s private higher education institutions.

In 2017, during Trump’s first term, a Republican Congress passed the first excise tax on college endowments. Private colleges and universities now pay an annual 1.4% excise tax on endowment net investment income. The excise tax is levied on schools that have at least 500 tuition-paying students and net assets of at least $500,000 per student. 

Because the $500,000 is not adjusted for inflation, the threshold is being effectively lowered over time. The tax has affected about 50-55 institutions to date. 

In 2023, 56 universities paid about $380 million under the endowment tax, up from about $68 million in 2021 and slightly more than the $200 million annual forecast made by the Joint Committee on Taxation in 2017.

In 2023, when he was still a U.S. Senator, J. D. Vance introduced the College Endowment Accountability Act which proposed increasing the excise tax from 1.4% to 35% for secular, private, nonprofit colleges and universities with at least $10 billion in assets under management.

“University endowments…have grown incredibly large on the backs of subsidies from the taxpayers, and they have made these universities completely independent of any political, financial, or other pressure, and that is why the university system in this country has gone so insane,” Vance asserted. 

Vance’s bill went nowhere, but the issue resurfaced in January 2025 when Rep. Troy E. Nehls (R-TX) introduced the Endowment Tax Fairness Act, a bill that would raise the excise tax levied on certain private university endowment profits from 1.4% to 21%. 

The tax would apply to private colleges and universities with 500 or more students with an aggregate fair market value of assets of at least $500,000 per student of the institution, and more than 50% of the student body is located within the United States. 

The Tax Foundation, assuming a 7.5 percent average annual return, estimates Nehis’ bill would raise about $69.8 billion in additional revenue over 10 years.

The House Ways & Means Committee also appears interested in raising the endowment tax rate. Committee Chair Jason Smith (R-MO) pitched the idea during an all-member meeting among House Republicans in January as well. 

In February, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) introduced the Endowment Accountability Act, proposing raising the excise tax rate from 1.4% to 10% of endowment income and lowering the per-student endowment threshold from $500,000 to $200,000, likely pulling in many more colleges.  

“If passed, such a tax would fundamentally alter the relationship between the government and many nonprofit colleges, as well as between those institutions and their donors,” reported Higher Ed Dive. “Moreover — and perhaps more importantly as a practical reality — such a tax could land hard on students, research programs and college operations.

Many institutions with much lower profiles than the Harvards of the world could get taxed if lawmakers broadened the threshold for paying, Jason Delisle, with the Urban Institute, said at an American Council on Education panel. And that’s exactly what higher ed institutions are preparing for. 

“University leaders and endowment chiefs also expect Congress to consider raising the tax on the richest endowments and expanding the number of schools affected,” the Wall Street Journal reported. And there’s talk of spreading the pain around more, hitting up smaller schools with smaller endowments, too. 

Although it may not be maintained in a final bill, under a tax plan unveiled by House Republicans on May 12, 2025, some universities would pay an annual tax of up to 21%. on their annual net investment income in endowments.

According to data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the asset management firm Commonfund, colleges spend the largest share of endowment funds on student financial aid (48.1% in FY2024), followed by academic programs and research (17.7% in FY2024).

Mauling endowments with egregious excise taxes would seriously threaten the ability of many schools to maintain these efforts, though that may not be of much concern to Trump and his allies, who have so far displayed little more than contempt for higher education.  

FY2024 endowments at selected private higher education institutions in Oregon[1]

InstitutionEndowment ($ millions)
Reed College814
Lewis and Clark College322
University of Portland315
Willamette University312
Linfield University118
Pacific University57
George Fox University34
Warner Pacific University18

[1]

 Source: 2024 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments (NCSE)

by - 0 comments

Separate but equal: a discredited idea re-emerges at Reed College

reedcollege

“We envision a vibrant, safe, and inclusive living environment…,” says Portland’s Reed College.

So much for that.

Like many other colleges and universities in the United States moving away from true diversity, Reed has approved an exclusive residential living space, Students of Color (SOC) Community, in the school’s Canyon House.

According to Reed, The SOC “is an intentional living community for returning students of color to heal together from systemic white supremacy, recover the parts of ourselves and our cultures that have been stolen through colonization, and dream new visions as we build vibrant, loving community together.”

With schools blasting out their commitment to diversity, why are so many heading down the path of separateness? Why such sophistry by week-kneed administrators in their efforts to justify “separate but equal” facilities?

Controversy has already erupted over other “themed” residential housing programs, with schools establishing separate living quarters for groups such as Native Americans, LGBTQ, non gender-binary, Asian/Pacific American,  and so on.

Two members of the United States Commission on Civil Rights —Gail Heriot and Peter Kirsanow, recently sent letters to the University of Connecticut and the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, lambasting UConn’s establishment of ScHOLA2RS House, a “Learning Community designed to support the scholastic efforts of students who identify as African-American/Black through academic and social support, access to research opportunities, and professional development.”

“We are deeply concerned that ScHOLA2RS House was established for the purpose, and will have the effect, of racial separation of African-American male students from others living in University of Connecticut dormitories,” Heriot and Kirsanow wrote. “… It is hard to avoid the conclusion that ScHOLA2RS House was intended to promote racial isolation on campus.  Moreover, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that it will in fact promote racial isolation on campus.”

“…we cannot understand how race-separate “learning communities” help achieve its ideals of “meaningful diversity” or prepare students to work in a racially diverse marketplace. Rather, by limiting students’ exposure to persons of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, they are more likely to do the opposite,” their letter to UConn said.

Cal State Los Angeles is embroiled in the same issue.

In November 2015, Cal State Los Angeles’ Black Student Union sent a list of demands to William A. Covino , the school’s (president). One of the demands was for “…the creation and financial support of a CSLA housing space delegated for Black students and a full time Resident Director who can cater to the needs of Black students. “

 

In response, this year the school debuted the Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community.

The Black Student Union posted on its Instagram account, “…we have finally launched our Black student housing that we demanded from President Covino back in November. The Halisi Scholars Black Living Learning Community is intended for the students on our campus that identify as Black/African American. “

Cal State LA says it is not sponsoring a segregated housing community because “This community is open to all students”, but students who identify as African-American are prioritized in selection.

 After Americans have struggled for decades to bring us all together, universities across the country are acquiescing in, even heartily endorsing, racial and ethnic separateness.

When the University of Oregon recruited Bobbie Robinson and Charles Williams as its first black athletes in 1926, they weren’t allowed to live in university dormitories. All students of color were required to rent housing off campus.

It was a long struggle, but universities across the country eventually opened their dormitories to residents of all colors and cultures. How ironic that many universities have now turned back the clock by establishing separate housing by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and more.

It’s all being done under the guise of building cultural bonds, uniting people with shared values and strengthening identities.

At Brown University in Rhode Island there’s Hispanic House and Harambee House, which is “…focused on perpetuating a sense of community, academic excellence, and leadership for all people of African descent.”

Harambee is Swahili for ” pulling or working together.” But self-segregation isn’t pulling people together; it’s pushing them apart, capitulating to pressure and reinforcing separatism.

Some academics, perhaps eager for student approval, argue that faculty support for self-segregation is a good thing because it stimulates bonding. “We teachers have an opportunity to stand in solidarity with our students who call for programmed houses on the basis of politicized racial identities,” wrote Amie A. Macdonald, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY.

“…anyone concerned with the long-range goal of securing broad-based freedom and autonomy should be committed to the continued existence of racially defined communities on the grounds that different racial identities provide people with different experiences of the world,” Macdonald said. “The preservation of racially defined communities of meaning secures the continued diversity of interpretations of the social world, thereby providing a richer array of know/edges from which to construct social, political, aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific accounts of our experience.”

Except for the fact this is very professorial, it sounds suspiciously like something Alabama Governor George C. Wallace would have said in less flowery language to affirm “segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.”