July 20, 2016 • 39 mins
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?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Bushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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
Rohan 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
(00:41):
twenty fifteen, 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.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Let me sell you.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
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
(01:39):
he didn't become everyone's hero. Why Hank Rowan's example didn't
spread beyond Glassborne, Jersey.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
He was six foot one or so, not not a
huge football player size, and you know, one hundred and
eighty pounds no thin, but not skinny, and had a
loud voice, strong presence.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And yeah he was what was his management style, like.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Benevolent dictator.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I think that's Rowan's daughter, Ginny Smith. She now runs
the company her father started in nineteen fifty three. It's
called Inducto Therm. It's right off the New Jersey Turnpike.
They make industrial furnaces for melting metal.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
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. Now
some of them are fifty ton They're just huge. And
kept branching out and acquired some companies and it kind
of it grew like topsy. But he also worked very,
(02:46):
very hard at it and hired good people.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
You know, he would run around and scuffed shoes and
tried to not worried about that. He didn't care how
he dressed her looked.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Roan was an engineer, raced sailboats, flew planes, bleeding hard work,
free enterprise.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
But you couldn't get him to buy a fancy car.
He was a nash rambler guy in the early days,
and he pooh poohed Mercedes because Mercedes wasn't one of
our customers.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Did he drive sort of nearly.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Near He drove Ozama bills and buicks and finding the
company here in Sicity. Drive a Lincoln. He drove it
into the ground just about.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
Oh.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
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's stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Almost thirty years ago, Hank Rowan became friends with a
man named Phil to Minia. To Minya was head of
development for the local college, Glassboro State, just down the road,
a little university started back in the nineteen twenties on
twenty five acres too. Minya 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,
(04:04):
but here's how Rowan remembered it in an interview he
gave a few years before he died with Don Ferris,
who's the former president of Glasboro State. He asked Rowan
how he first got involved with the college.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, I think we blame it all on Phil Tomidia
because he came to see me and asked if I
might make a donation to the scholarship fund of fifteen
hundred dollars. Well that sounded easy, fifteen hundred dollars, so
we gave him fifteen hundred dollars. And you know what
he came.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Back to many I wanted Rowan to give money to
the business school, which was pretty dilapidated.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
So he pushed that for a while and finally 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 one hundred million dollars? And he nearly fell off
the chair. But that's how we got to that level,
(05:05):
and that's what was the beginning.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
So you're the one that suggested one hundred million dollar figure.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Not oh yeah, you were talking about ten.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I see, this is nineteen ninety two, A generation ago.
Almost nobody gave donations of one hundred million dollars. Back then,
this was unheard of money. Rowan's gift made headlines around
the country. He set a new standard.
Speaker 6 (05:28):
Did you think it changed the world? The in right ability.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
At Rowan's memorial service, phil Toominia gets up and says,
I think accurately that Roan 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.
Speaker 6 (05:45):
From July of nineteen ninety two until the end of
that decade, twenty gifts twenty gifts of one hundred million
dollars of war we were given out in this country.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. As of right now
spring of twenty sixteen, we're up to eighty seven gifts
of one hundred million dollars or more to higher education.
So everyone followed Rowan's lead, except not really. Rowan gave
his money to Glasporo State College, a public university in
(06:21):
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 seven hundred
and eighty seven thousand dollars. 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.
(06:42):
Let me just read to you the names of some
of the educational institutions that had received the largest donations
in American history. Ready, in twenty thirteen, 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
(07:05):
three four hundred million dollar donations. The first is the
billionaire John Klugie's gift to Columbia University in two thousand
and seven. The second is the hedge fund manager John
Paulson's gift to Harvard University in twenty fifteen. The third
is Phil Knight's gift to Stanford University in twenty sixteen.
And after that, in order, here are the universities that
(07:26):
get the biggest donations. JOHNS. Hopkins Harvard again, University of Chicago, Princeton, Tuft's,
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 eighty seven,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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 Boden
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
(08:32):
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 turned. But there's a problem. A lot
of that philanthropy doesn't make any sense. It's going to
(08:54):
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 four hundred
million dollars to Harvard and to twenty fifteen, I had
a kind of Twitter meltdown, sending tweet after tweet, including
it came down to helping the poor or giving the
(09:16):
world's richest university fond of million dollars. It doesn't need
wise choice, John, and then if billionaires don't step up,
Harvard will soon be down to its last thirty billion.
Then when Phil Knight gave fondred million dollars to Stanford,
I got called up for comment by The New York Times.
I said that Stamford was part of a crazy arms
race and ought to cut its endowment in half and
(09:39):
give the balance to schools that actually need the money.
The next day, I got an email from the President
of Stanford, John Hennessy. 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 completely baffled by
my talk with Hennessy. It was as if he and
(10:01):
I were speaking different languages. I understand the people who
give money to those who need money, the people who
give money to these 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
(10:21):
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 Sally and Chris Anderson, who wrote
a really great book a couple of years ago about
soccer called The Numbers Game. One of the questions they
asked was what matters more if you want to build
(10:41):
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.
Speaker 7 (10:53):
Soccer is a game where if you get a single goal,
if you just happen to be lucky, that goal may
hold up.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
That's David Sally, and.
Speaker 7 (11:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Sally's argument goes like this, a soccer team has eleven
players on the field at any one time. Suppose one
is a superstar and your worst player is maybe only
forty five percent as good as a superstar. Because soccer
is a sport where everyone on the field depends on
everyone else, that forty five percent player can make one
(11:33):
mistake and completely negate the skill of the best player.
You can have eight beautiful passes in a row, but
if your worst player, your forty five percent player, botches
the ninth, then all the previous eight beautiful passes are
all wasted.
Speaker 7 (11:46):
That's right, and because of the nature of soccer that
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.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
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.
Speaker 7 (12:18):
Yes, having a better superstar was of course better, but
actually having a better end of the bench or eleventh
guy on the pitch was actually more influential to whether
you won matches or not, which.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Would be the exact opposite of basketball.
Speaker 7 (12:33):
Yeah, basketball is probably the opposite end of the continuum
from If you think about soccer is maybe the weakest
link sport, Basketball is probably the most superstarter of a
team sport that we have.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Even the greatest basketball teams often have won, 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
(13:07):
his generation.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
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 back court, 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.
(13:29):
Leo Messi is so good that sometimes from rare times
where in fact he can dribble the length of the pitch.
But the fact is that he in most instances, he
really can't. He needs to be He needs those eight
beautiful passes to set him up, and then he could
do something amazingly transcendent with it.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
I think the weak link strong link distinction is incredibly
useful in making sense of certain kinds of problems. I
suppose I said to you, for example, here's fifty billion dollars.
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
(14:15):
more gorgeous. No, you 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 fifty billion dollars in New York. If
you do that, you're essentially saying air travel in the
(14:37):
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
(14:58):
more geniuses than anyone else, like James Watt who invents
the steam engine. But there's an economist named Joel Moker
who makes a really compelling argument that England's advance is
that it had way more craftsmen and skilled engineers and
experienced in mechanically minded backyard tinkers than anyone else. Those
were the people who were able to take those inventions
(15:20):
and perfect them and make them useful. Moker 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 Rohn is a weak link guy.
(15:44):
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 forty five percent player,
not the superstar. He thinks America is soccer, not basketball.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
You're a graduate of MIT right here.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
He is again in the interview with Don Ferish of
Glasboro State.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
Now, I would assume that MIT at that time would
have been interested in receiving a gift of that size
from you. Did you did you think about giving it
to that university?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
You're no, okay. They were at the time trying to
raise seven hundred and fifty million dollars, and my little
Hunter Mayon wouldn't have made hardly any immerge at.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
All, hardly any difference at all. That's David Sally's point
about soccer. Upgrading the superstar doesn't help as much as
upgrading the worst player. Here's Hank Rowen's daughter Jinny again.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
So he funds an engineering school in Glassboro. It's not
the best or the fancy engineering school in the country,
but it's not supposed to be. So it's one one
four story building?
Speaker 8 (17:16):
Is it four is it's three story building? And then
it has two wings to it, and there's labs.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
We'll walk down.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
I went for a tour with Joe Cardona, the university's
head of pr.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
You know, we're in a state institution, so a building
like this was like wow.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
I was bang.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
You know, look it's an engineer and building. Yeah, and
so here, why don't we just walk down a holiday
of it.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
The school was built in the mid nineteen nineties for
five hundred students. They've now crammed seven hundred and fifty
into the building while they wait for a new annex
to be finished next door. Eventually they want to double
the school 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
(17:58):
were working on a Baja car, basically a home engineer
doom buggy that will race against other engineering schools on
an endurance course.
Speaker 9 (18:06):
So we got some aircraft grade aluminum. We have it
two access water jack cutter that can cut out profiles,
and we design a part that's bolted together that way.
Speaker 7 (18:15):
It's nice and strong.
Speaker 9 (18:16):
And they're graded bolt. But if it does break, you
can replace individual pieces without having to make a whole
new assembly.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
The four students I meet, Matt, Seohn, Owen, and Kyle
all grew up around here. Are most of the students
in the engineering school from New Jersey?
Speaker 7 (18:31):
I would say, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Net tuition in state is about nine thousand dollars a year,
which is pretty reasonable for an engineering school. Ninety five
percent get jobs in engineering when they graduate, and.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
We really want to do what I call a blue
collar research, research that is practical that people can see
the tangible.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Result of Ali Hushman, the university's president. He's an immigrant
from Iran. He grew up in a slum in Tehran,
fifth in a family of ten.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
People used to ask me to compare you. That said,
the best competison would be to tell you, if you
have seen slum Dog Millionaire, you look at that. This
one was twice as hard and tough. Oh. Yes, we're
a very close family, but very poor. I mean poor
to the extent that you walk in the streets without shoes.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Hushman 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.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
A profile of a kid from engineering. Your father is
a you know, fireman, a mom is a teacher. The
kid has been going to a public school. He's from
forty miles from here, and he's just a brilliant young
man or woman. Gone through public school and got great
(19:53):
schools and very much focused.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
It's you in other words, Yes, yes, school full of valley.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yes, yeah, that's the beauty of it, Malcolm. That's why
I say it's a blue collar university.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Now I'm convinced by Ali Huschmann and by Hank Rowen.
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 weeklink, not strong link. What
matters is how good our eleventh player is, not our first.
We're in a second industrial revolution, and the lesson of
(20:32):
this one isn't any different from the lesson of the
last one. But it's really hard to get people to
accept weeklink arguments. David Sally, 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 eighty
million pounds on one superstar player, spend it on four
(20:55):
pretty good players at twenty million pounds each. But the
oligarch doesn't want to hear that.
Speaker 7 (21:01):
If the oligarch is only worried about winning soccer matches,
I can sell that that's believable. Oligarchs by 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 link strategy is not gonna be
(21:21):
the most glamorous thing.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
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.
Speaker 7 (21:36):
What people remember are the unbelievably beautiful goals.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
It's a brilliant road for missing.
Speaker 8 (21:42):
I'm going to go all away.
Speaker 10 (21:45):
It's gonna be great coming away final goals.
Speaker 7 (21:49):
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.
Speaker 10 (22:10):
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, to lead on attacking the.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Important John Hennessy, president of Stanford University since two thousand,
widely considered one of the greatest presidents in Stanford history.
Speaker 8 (22:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Not long before we talked, I took a walk across
the Stanford campus and it's like entering a shrine higher education.
Everything is gleaming, gorgeous, groomed green. That's all Hennessy's work.
He's transformed the school, doubled the endowment from eleven to
twenty two billion dollars, made it into maybe the greatest university.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
In the world.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
When we talked, he was just about to retire and
thinking about his legacy.
Speaker 8 (23:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Hennessy decided he wanted to start a graduate program kind
of like the Rhodes Scholarship. Every year, it would bring
one hundred of the brightest, most accomplished college grads from
around the world to Stamford and let them apply their
minds to the problems of the world. He goes to
his deans, then his trustees. Everyone loves the idea.
Speaker 8 (23:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Remember, Phil Knight is the co founder of Nike, a
billionaire many times over at a serious philanthropist. How did
you pick Phil Knight as someone to approach? Was he
the first person you approached?
Speaker 8 (24:20):
I knew Phil had been concerned about leadership globally. He
and I had had a good working relationship.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
So he ends up giving four hundred million. How does
what arrive at that number? Is that a number you
suggested to him.
Speaker 8 (24:33):
It's roughly half. I mean where our goal is somewhere
in the seven fifty to eight hundred to implement the
entire program, secure it permanently, and so I think in
the past finding a naming gift that of that scale
is probably necessary, and then you can find gifts to
fill in the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
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 eight hundred million dollar graduate program for one
hundred elites.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Doud.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
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
eight hundred million on the most exclusive group he can find.
Rowan is a weaklink guy. His world is soccer. Hennessy
(25:30):
is playing basketball and he wants to focus his billions
on the superstars. In the time you've been to Stanford,
that endowment went from what from eleven to twenty two,
Is that right?
Speaker 10 (25:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (25:41):
Probably about eleven to twenty two, right, most of that's
endowment returns, not mostly gifts, but there's some gifts in
there too, obviously.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
What is uh, how much is enough for institution lake Stanford?
Speaker 8 (25:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
In other words, there really isn't such a thing at
Stanford as enough money. The school's ambitions are always growing,
so it's 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 hard core
strong linker. Hypothetically, if you know Bill Gates or Larry
(26:44):
Ellison came to you and said, I'm giving you ten
billion dollars, 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 the money to good use.
Speaker 8 (27:01):
Well, first of all, I don't think either Larry Ellison
or Bill Gates is going to give me ten billion
dollar 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 I know both
of them, I can tell you they won't.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
They won't do it.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Could you make an argument to Larry Ellison as you
could put if he gave you ten billion, you could
put it to good use, ten billion just to put
us in the ballpark. Because I worry sometimes that Americans
get a little jaded about big numbers. Ten billion is
a few billion more than the gross domestic product of Barbados,
and four billion shy of the gross domestic product of Jamaica. Basically,
(27:44):
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 ten billion gets to write it off, and
every dollar Stanford earns on that ten billion, they get
to keep ten billion.
Speaker 8 (28:03):
I'd have to do something really dramatic for ten billion dollars,
really dramatic.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
He thinks about it for a moment. Actually, I counted
for about two seconds. Then he comes up with something
really dramatic.
Speaker 8 (28:17):
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 billion dollars a year
(28:37):
in biomedical research.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Ten billion. He could totally use another ten 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
(29:01):
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, Davis, Santa Barbara, et cetera.
Maybe the finest group of public universities in the world.
(29:23):
If you listen 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 one hundred and
eighty universities in the US according to how good a
job they do in finding, educating, and financially supporting low
income students. Right now, Vasser comes in eighth. Well, six
(29:44):
of the first seven spots on that list are University
of California schools. Stanford has sixteen thousand students. The UC
system has two hundred and thirty eight thousand students. So
I'm asking John Hannessy, might there ever ever be an
instance where he might tell a would be super philanthropist. Look,
(30:06):
we've already got twenty two billion dollars in the BA,
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 two hundred and twenty two
thousand more students than we do with a fraction of
(30:26):
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.
Speaker 8 (30:40):
Turn them 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.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
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
(31:15):
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 eight hundred million dollars on a
boutique graduate program for one hundred elite students a year.
That kind of using money, Well.
Speaker 11 (31:32):
It is the pre eminent 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.
Speaker 7 (31:43):
When this program is established.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
That's the promotional video for the Scholarship Fund. You just
heard Phil Knight talking about it. You can watch all
four minutes and twenty three seconds of it at revisionististory
dot 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
(32:08):
the proceeds of investing eight hundred million dollars. It's an endowment.
The usual rule of thumb is that an endowment gives
you about five percent a year, so forty million dollars
and with one hundred students a year in a three
year program, that comes out to one hundred and thirty
three thousand dollars per student. One hundred and thirty three
thousand dollars per student per year are precious medals also involved? Helicopters?
(32:35):
Are they doing this on a beach at Saint Bart's.
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
one hundred million dollar gift that the Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg gave to the New Jersey public school system. Newark
historically has some of the worst public schools in the country,
(32:58):
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 That's 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
(33:21):
first thing that the strong Link guy wants to do
with his crack team of eight hundred million dollar scholars
is critique the weak Link decision to spend one hundred
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
(33:41):
what if Stanford's mega million dollar scholars can't answer that question,
should another billionaire give it even more money to an
even more lead school to answer the question of why
the four hundred million dollar gift to study the one
hundred million dollar gift hasn't worked out. Please stop me
before I tweet again. I'm not saying that the strong
(34:06):
Link approach is never appropriate. I grew up in Canada
in the nineteen seventies, 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 in technology university. So they created that, the
University of Waterloo, and it was a great idea. But
(34:26):
the United States today is not Canada in the nineteen seventies.
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.
(34:51):
February twenty fourteen, the billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin
gives one hundred and fifty million dollars to Harvard is
to support Harvard's financial aid program. Here's what the President
of Harvard says, Ken Griffin's extraordinary philanthropy is opening Harvard's
gate wider to the most talented students in the world,
(35:12):
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
(35:34):
had an endowment of thirty six billion dollars. So a
billionaire gives one hundred and fifty million to an institution
that has an endowment of thirty six 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 thirty six billion might not be enough to ensure
(35:56):
continued access to this outstanding institution. These two comments were
not off the cough 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
(36:18):
to the eighteen hundreds and came up with what they
thought was the most compelling justification for why giving another
one hundred and fifty million dollars 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
(36:38):
guess back to my conversation with John Hennessy of Stanford,
and I'm just curious about whether how common or how
often do you run into the two 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?
Speaker 8 (37:00):
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?
(37:22):
What can we do to that's transformative? How can we
increase our contributions to the world.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
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
(37:50):
a little trip to Glassborough, New Jersey, to the campus
of what's now called Rowan University. Maybe take a look
at the statue up front.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Cannot he's talking about family? Have we got everything?
Speaker 7 (38:04):
I would say, as.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
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 rate us on iTunes, it helps
a lot. You can find more information about this and
other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
podcast app. Our show is produced by Mee La Belle,
(38:35):
Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Music is composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yazuzawa. Flon
Williams is our engineer. Fact checker Michelle Surraka. Thanks to
the Penalty Management team Mora Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Bushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
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
Rohan 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
(00:41):
twenty fifteen, 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.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Let me sell you.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
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
(01:39):
he didn't become everyone's hero. Why Hank Rowan's example didn't
spread beyond Glassborne, Jersey.
Speaker 4 (01:53):
He was six foot one or so, not not a
huge football player size, and you know, one hundred and
eighty pounds no thin, but not skinny, and had a
loud voice, strong presence.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
And yeah he was what was his management style, like.
Speaker 4 (02:10):
Benevolent dictator.
Speaker 2 (02:11):
I think that's Rowan's daughter, Ginny Smith. She now runs
the company her father started in nineteen fifty three. It's
called Inducto Therm. It's right off the New Jersey Turnpike.
They make industrial furnaces for melting metal.
Speaker 4 (02:25):
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. Now
some of them are fifty ton They're just huge. And
kept branching out and acquired some companies and it kind
of it grew like topsy. But he also worked very,
(02:46):
very hard at it and hired good people.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
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.
Speaker 4 (02:59):
You know, he would run around and scuffed shoes and
tried to not worried about that. He didn't care how
he dressed her looked.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Roan was an engineer, raced sailboats, flew planes, bleeding hard work,
free enterprise.
Speaker 4 (03:10):
But you couldn't get him to buy a fancy car.
He was a nash rambler guy in the early days,
and he pooh poohed Mercedes because Mercedes wasn't one of
our customers.
Speaker 2 (03:21):
Did he drive sort of nearly.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Near He drove Ozama bills and buicks and finding the
company here in Sicity. Drive a Lincoln. He drove it
into the ground just about.
Speaker 5 (03:32):
Oh.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
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's stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
Almost thirty years ago, Hank Rowan became friends with a
man named Phil to Minia. To Minya was head of
development for the local college, Glassboro State, just down the road,
a little university started back in the nineteen twenties on
twenty five acres too. Minya 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,
(04:04):
but here's how Rowan remembered it in an interview he
gave a few years before he died with Don Ferris,
who's the former president of Glasboro State. He asked Rowan
how he first got involved with the college.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
Well, I think we blame it all on Phil Tomidia
because he came to see me and asked if I
might make a donation to the scholarship fund of fifteen
hundred dollars. Well that sounded easy, fifteen hundred dollars, so
we gave him fifteen hundred dollars. And you know what
he came.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
Back to many I wanted Rowan to give money to
the business school, which was pretty dilapidated.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
So he pushed that for a while and finally 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 one hundred million dollars? And he nearly fell off
the chair. But that's how we got to that level,
(05:05):
and that's what was the beginning.
Speaker 5 (05:08):
So you're the one that suggested one hundred million dollar figure.
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Not oh yeah, you were talking about ten.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
I see, this is nineteen ninety two, A generation ago.
Almost nobody gave donations of one hundred million dollars. Back then,
this was unheard of money. Rowan's gift made headlines around
the country. He set a new standard.
Speaker 6 (05:28):
Did you think it changed the world? The in right ability.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
At Rowan's memorial service, phil Toominia gets up and says,
I think accurately that Roan 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.
Speaker 6 (05:45):
From July of nineteen ninety two until the end of
that decade, twenty gifts twenty gifts of one hundred million
dollars of war we were given out in this country.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. As of right now
spring of twenty sixteen, we're up to eighty seven gifts
of one hundred million dollars or more to higher education.
So everyone followed Rowan's lead, except not really. Rowan gave
his money to Glasporo State College, a public university in
(06:21):
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 seven hundred
and eighty seven thousand dollars. 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.
(06:42):
Let me just read to you the names of some
of the educational institutions that had received the largest donations
in American history. Ready, in twenty thirteen, 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
(07:05):
three four hundred million dollar donations. The first is the
billionaire John Klugie's gift to Columbia University in two thousand
and seven. The second is the hedge fund manager John
Paulson's gift to Harvard University in twenty fifteen. The third
is Phil Knight's gift to Stanford University in twenty sixteen.
And after that, in order, here are the universities that
(07:26):
get the biggest donations. JOHNS. Hopkins Harvard again, University of Chicago, Princeton, Tuft's,
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 eighty seven,
(07:48):
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
(08:11):
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 Boden
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
(08:32):
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 turned. But there's a problem. A lot
of that philanthropy doesn't make any sense. It's going to
(08:54):
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 four hundred
million dollars to Harvard and to twenty fifteen, I had
a kind of Twitter meltdown, sending tweet after tweet, including
it came down to helping the poor or giving the
(09:16):
world's richest university fond of million dollars. It doesn't need
wise choice, John, and then if billionaires don't step up,
Harvard will soon be down to its last thirty billion.
Then when Phil Knight gave fondred million dollars to Stanford,
I got called up for comment by The New York Times.
I said that Stamford was part of a crazy arms
race and ought to cut its endowment in half and
(09:39):
give the balance to schools that actually need the money.
The next day, I got an email from the President
of Stanford, John Hennessy. 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 completely baffled by
my talk with Hennessy. It was as if he and
(10:01):
I were speaking different languages. I understand the people who
give money to those who need money, the people who
give money to these 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
(10:21):
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 Sally and Chris Anderson, who wrote
a really great book a couple of years ago about
soccer called The Numbers Game. One of the questions they
asked was what matters more if you want to build
(10:41):
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.
Speaker 7 (10:53):
Soccer is a game where if you get a single goal,
if you just happen to be lucky, that goal may
hold up.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
That's David Sally, and.
Speaker 7 (11:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
Sally's argument goes like this, a soccer team has eleven
players on the field at any one time. Suppose one
is a superstar and your worst player is maybe only
forty five percent as good as a superstar. Because soccer
is a sport where everyone on the field depends on
everyone else, that forty five percent player can make one
(11:33):
mistake and completely negate the skill of the best player.
You can have eight beautiful passes in a row, but
if your worst player, your forty five percent player, botches
the ninth, then all the previous eight beautiful passes are
all wasted.
Speaker 7 (11:46):
That's right, and because of the nature of soccer that
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.
Speaker 2 (12:00):
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.
Speaker 7 (12:18):
Yes, having a better superstar was of course better, but
actually having a better end of the bench or eleventh
guy on the pitch was actually more influential to whether
you won matches or not, which.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Would be the exact opposite of basketball.
Speaker 7 (12:33):
Yeah, basketball is probably the opposite end of the continuum
from If you think about soccer is maybe the weakest
link sport, Basketball is probably the most superstarter of a
team sport that we have.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
Even the greatest basketball teams often have won, 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
(13:07):
his generation.
Speaker 7 (13:09):
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 back court, 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.
(13:29):
Leo Messi is so good that sometimes from rare times
where in fact he can dribble the length of the pitch.
But the fact is that he in most instances, he
really can't. He needs to be He needs those eight
beautiful passes to set him up, and then he could
do something amazingly transcendent with it.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
I think the weak link strong link distinction is incredibly
useful in making sense of certain kinds of problems. I
suppose I said to you, for example, here's fifty billion dollars.
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
(14:15):
more gorgeous. No, you 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 fifty billion dollars in New York. If
you do that, you're essentially saying air travel in the
(14:37):
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
(14:58):
more geniuses than anyone else, like James Watt who invents
the steam engine. But there's an economist named Joel Moker
who makes a really compelling argument that England's advance is
that it had way more craftsmen and skilled engineers and
experienced in mechanically minded backyard tinkers than anyone else. Those
were the people who were able to take those inventions
(15:20):
and perfect them and make them useful. Moker 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 Rohn is a weak link guy.
(15:44):
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 forty five percent player,
not the superstar. He thinks America is soccer, not basketball.
Speaker 5 (15:57):
You're a graduate of MIT right here.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
He is again in the interview with Don Ferish of
Glasboro State.
Speaker 5 (16:05):
Now, I would assume that MIT at that time would
have been interested in receiving a gift of that size
from you. Did you did you think about giving it
to that university?
Speaker 1 (16:17):
You're no, okay. They were at the time trying to
raise seven hundred and fifty million dollars, and my little
Hunter Mayon wouldn't have made hardly any immerge at.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
All, hardly any difference at all. That's David Sally's point
about soccer. Upgrading the superstar doesn't help as much as
upgrading the worst player. Here's Hank Rowen's daughter Jinny again.
Speaker 4 (16:44):
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.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
So he funds an engineering school in Glassboro. It's not
the best or the fancy engineering school in the country,
but it's not supposed to be. So it's one one
four story building?
Speaker 8 (17:16):
Is it four is it's three story building? And then
it has two wings to it, and there's labs.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
We'll walk down.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
I went for a tour with Joe Cardona, the university's
head of pr.
Speaker 3 (17:26):
You know, we're in a state institution, so a building
like this was like wow.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
I was bang.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
You know, look it's an engineer and building. Yeah, and
so here, why don't we just walk down a holiday
of it.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (17:36):
The school was built in the mid nineteen nineties for
five hundred students. They've now crammed seven hundred and fifty
into the building while they wait for a new annex
to be finished next door. Eventually they want to double
the school 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
(17:58):
were working on a Baja car, basically a home engineer
doom buggy that will race against other engineering schools on
an endurance course.
Speaker 9 (18:06):
So we got some aircraft grade aluminum. We have it
two access water jack cutter that can cut out profiles,
and we design a part that's bolted together that way.
Speaker 7 (18:15):
It's nice and strong.
Speaker 9 (18:16):
And they're graded bolt. But if it does break, you
can replace individual pieces without having to make a whole
new assembly.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
The four students I meet, Matt, Seohn, Owen, and Kyle
all grew up around here. Are most of the students
in the engineering school from New Jersey?
Speaker 7 (18:31):
I would say, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
Net tuition in state is about nine thousand dollars a year,
which is pretty reasonable for an engineering school. Ninety five
percent get jobs in engineering when they graduate, and.
Speaker 3 (18:45):
We really want to do what I call a blue
collar research, research that is practical that people can see
the tangible.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
Result of Ali Hushman, the university's president. He's an immigrant
from Iran. He grew up in a slum in Tehran,
fifth in a family of ten.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
People used to ask me to compare you. That said,
the best competison would be to tell you, if you
have seen slum Dog Millionaire, you look at that. This
one was twice as hard and tough. Oh. Yes, we're
a very close family, but very poor. I mean poor
to the extent that you walk in the streets without shoes.
Speaker 2 (19:20):
Hushman 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.
Speaker 3 (19:33):
A profile of a kid from engineering. Your father is
a you know, fireman, a mom is a teacher. The
kid has been going to a public school. He's from
forty miles from here, and he's just a brilliant young
man or woman. Gone through public school and got great
(19:53):
schools and very much focused.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
It's you in other words, Yes, yes, school full of valley.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
Yes, yeah, that's the beauty of it, Malcolm. That's why
I say it's a blue collar university.
Speaker 2 (20:10):
Now I'm convinced by Ali Huschmann and by Hank Rowen.
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 weeklink, not strong link. What
matters is how good our eleventh player is, not our first.
We're in a second industrial revolution, and the lesson of
(20:32):
this one isn't any different from the lesson of the
last one. But it's really hard to get people to
accept weeklink arguments. David Sally, 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 eighty
million pounds on one superstar player, spend it on four
(20:55):
pretty good players at twenty million pounds each. But the
oligarch doesn't want to hear that.
Speaker 7 (21:01):
If the oligarch is only worried about winning soccer matches,
I can sell that that's believable. Oligarchs by 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 link strategy is not gonna be
(21:21):
the most glamorous thing.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
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.
Speaker 7 (21:36):
What people remember are the unbelievably beautiful goals.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
It's a brilliant road for missing.
Speaker 8 (21:42):
I'm going to go all away.
Speaker 10 (21:45):
It's gonna be great coming away final goals.
Speaker 7 (21:49):
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.
Speaker 10 (22:10):
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, to lead on attacking the.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
Important John Hennessy, president of Stanford University since two thousand,
widely considered one of the greatest presidents in Stanford history.
Speaker 8 (22:35):
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.
Speaker 2 (22:55):
Not long before we talked, I took a walk across
the Stanford campus and it's like entering a shrine higher education.
Everything is gleaming, gorgeous, groomed green. That's all Hennessy's work.
He's transformed the school, doubled the endowment from eleven to
twenty two billion dollars, made it into maybe the greatest university.
Speaker 4 (23:18):
In the world.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
When we talked, he was just about to retire and
thinking about his legacy.
Speaker 8 (23:24):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Hennessy decided he wanted to start a graduate program kind
of like the Rhodes Scholarship. Every year, it would bring
one hundred of the brightest, most accomplished college grads from
around the world to Stamford and let them apply their
minds to the problems of the world. He goes to
his deans, then his trustees. Everyone loves the idea.
Speaker 8 (23:58):
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.
Speaker 2 (24:09):
Remember, Phil Knight is the co founder of Nike, a
billionaire many times over at a serious philanthropist. How did
you pick Phil Knight as someone to approach? Was he
the first person you approached?
Speaker 8 (24:20):
I knew Phil had been concerned about leadership globally. He
and I had had a good working relationship.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
So he ends up giving four hundred million. How does
what arrive at that number? Is that a number you
suggested to him.
Speaker 8 (24:33):
It's roughly half. I mean where our goal is somewhere
in the seven fifty to eight hundred to implement the
entire program, secure it permanently, and so I think in
the past finding a naming gift that of that scale
is probably necessary, and then you can find gifts to
fill in the rest of it.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
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 eight hundred million dollar graduate program for one
hundred elites.
Speaker 1 (25:08):
Doud.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
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
eight hundred million on the most exclusive group he can find.
Rowan is a weaklink guy. His world is soccer. Hennessy
(25:30):
is playing basketball and he wants to focus his billions
on the superstars. In the time you've been to Stanford,
that endowment went from what from eleven to twenty two,
Is that right?
Speaker 10 (25:41):
Yeah?
Speaker 8 (25:41):
Probably about eleven to twenty two, right, most of that's
endowment returns, not mostly gifts, but there's some gifts in
there too, obviously.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
What is uh, how much is enough for institution lake Stanford?
Speaker 8 (25:54):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:19):
In other words, there really isn't such a thing at
Stanford as enough money. The school's ambitions are always growing,
so it's 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 hard core
strong linker. Hypothetically, if you know Bill Gates or Larry
(26:44):
Ellison came to you and said, I'm giving you ten
billion dollars, 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 the money to good use.
Speaker 8 (27:01):
Well, first of all, I don't think either Larry Ellison
or Bill Gates is going to give me ten billion
dollar 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 I know both
of them, I can tell you they won't.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
They won't do it.
Speaker 2 (27:18):
Could you make an argument to Larry Ellison as you
could put if he gave you ten billion, you could
put it to good use, ten billion just to put
us in the ballpark. Because I worry sometimes that Americans
get a little jaded about big numbers. Ten billion is
a few billion more than the gross domestic product of Barbados,
and four billion shy of the gross domestic product of Jamaica. Basically,
(27:44):
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 ten billion gets to write it off, and
every dollar Stanford earns on that ten billion, they get
to keep ten billion.
Speaker 8 (28:03):
I'd have to do something really dramatic for ten billion dollars,
really dramatic.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
He thinks about it for a moment. Actually, I counted
for about two seconds. Then he comes up with something
really dramatic.
Speaker 8 (28:17):
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 billion dollars a year
(28:37):
in biomedical research.
Speaker 2 (28:41):
Ten billion. He could totally use another ten 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
(29:01):
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, Davis, Santa Barbara, et cetera.
Maybe the finest group of public universities in the world.
(29:23):
If you listen 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 one hundred and
eighty universities in the US according to how good a
job they do in finding, educating, and financially supporting low
income students. Right now, Vasser comes in eighth. Well, six
(29:44):
of the first seven spots on that list are University
of California schools. Stanford has sixteen thousand students. The UC
system has two hundred and thirty eight thousand students. So
I'm asking John Hannessy, might there ever ever be an
instance where he might tell a would be super philanthropist. Look,
(30:06):
we've already got twenty two billion dollars in the BA,
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 two hundred and twenty two
thousand more students than we do with a fraction of
(30:26):
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.
Speaker 8 (30:40):
Turn them 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.
Speaker 2 (30:55):
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
(31:15):
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 eight hundred million dollars on a
boutique graduate program for one hundred elite students a year.
That kind of using money, Well.
Speaker 11 (31:32):
It is the pre eminent 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.
Speaker 7 (31:43):
When this program is established.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
That's the promotional video for the Scholarship Fund. You just
heard Phil Knight talking about it. You can watch all
four minutes and twenty three seconds of it at revisionististory
dot 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
(32:08):
the proceeds of investing eight hundred million dollars. It's an endowment.
The usual rule of thumb is that an endowment gives
you about five percent a year, so forty million dollars
and with one hundred students a year in a three
year program, that comes out to one hundred and thirty
three thousand dollars per student. One hundred and thirty three
thousand dollars per student per year are precious medals also involved? Helicopters?
(32:35):
Are they doing this on a beach at Saint Bart's.
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
one hundred million dollar gift that the Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg gave to the New Jersey public school system. Newark
historically has some of the worst public schools in the country,
(32:58):
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 That's 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
(33:21):
first thing that the strong Link guy wants to do
with his crack team of eight hundred million dollar scholars
is critique the weak Link decision to spend one hundred
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
(33:41):
what if Stanford's mega million dollar scholars can't answer that question,
should another billionaire give it even more money to an
even more lead school to answer the question of why
the four hundred million dollar gift to study the one
hundred million dollar gift hasn't worked out. Please stop me
before I tweet again. I'm not saying that the strong
(34:06):
Link approach is never appropriate. I grew up in Canada
in the nineteen seventies, 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 in technology university. So they created that, the
University of Waterloo, and it was a great idea. But
(34:26):
the United States today is not Canada in the nineteen seventies.
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.
(34:51):
February twenty fourteen, the billionaire hedge fund manager Ken Griffin
gives one hundred and fifty million dollars to Harvard is
to support Harvard's financial aid program. Here's what the President
of Harvard says, Ken Griffin's extraordinary philanthropy is opening Harvard's
gate wider to the most talented students in the world,
(35:12):
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
(35:34):
had an endowment of thirty six billion dollars. So a
billionaire gives one hundred and fifty million to an institution
that has an endowment of thirty six 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 thirty six billion might not be enough to ensure
(35:56):
continued access to this outstanding institution. These two comments were
not off the cough 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
(36:18):
to the eighteen hundreds and came up with what they
thought was the most compelling justification for why giving another
one hundred and fifty million dollars 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
(36:38):
guess back to my conversation with John Hennessy of Stanford,
and I'm just curious about whether how common or how
often do you run into the two 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?
Speaker 8 (37:00):
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?
(37:22):
What can we do to that's transformative? How can we
increase our contributions to the world.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
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
(37:50):
a little trip to Glassborough, New Jersey, to the campus
of what's now called Rowan University. Maybe take a look
at the statue up front.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Cannot he's talking about family? Have we got everything?
Speaker 7 (38:04):
I would say, as.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
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 rate us on iTunes, it helps
a lot. You can find more information about this and
other episodes at Revisionististory dot com or on your favorite
podcast app. Our show is produced by Mee La Belle,
(38:35):
Roxanne Scott and Jacob Smith. Our editor is Julia Barton.
Music is composed by Luis Gera and Taka Yazuzawa. Flon
Williams is our engineer. Fact checker Michelle Surraka. Thanks to
the Penalty Management team Mora Mayer, Andy Bauers and Jacob Weisberg.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell.
Host
Malcolm Gladwell
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