GRAB THEM BY THE WALLET. THEIR HEARTS AND MINDS FOLLOW.

OK, that's an economist talking, it's a pale version of the maxim elite forces live by.  It works well enough, though, for academic issues.  Here's former Vassar president C. B. Hill, contemplating endowment taxes.

Colleges and universities subject to the new tax, and others that worry about the precedent of taxing institutions of higher education or expect they also might be subject to the tax, have lobbied hard to remove this provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Even after it was passed in 2017, efforts to amend it have continued.

Here’s a better strategy: carefully consider congressional motivation and address the underlying concerns of policy makers. Waiting for new leaders in Congress and expecting a reversal in thinking may not pay off. The tax bill passed along party lines when the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate were controlled by the Republicans, so their concerns about elite higher education are noteworthy. The majority party in the House has changed and, with an election in 2020, we could see further shifts, but legislators in both parties have raised issues about higher education.

As long as the "concerns" were limited to polemical books in the vein of Closing of the American Mind and Prof Scam, business as usual worked.  Tax those hedge funds, er, endowments, and how the piggies squeal!

For example, many Republicans who supported the tax bill in 2017 continue to be concerned that colleges do not adequately protect free speech, including representation of conservative points of view in the classroom and from speakers invited to campus. Most college leaders are committed to free speech and diversity of points of view, regarding them as important to both learning and the pursuit of new knowledge. While most institutions do, in fact, welcome a variety of ideological points of view, I suspect there is also a significant political tilt in the views represented.

You suspect? You suspect?  I've only been pointing such things out for thirty or so years, seventeen on this service, and only when the power to tax becomes the power to destroy do you consider changing your ways.

A stronger effort to present ideological diversity on our campuses would go further to win back support from the right. Doing so would improve learning on campus, since wrestling with different points of view encourages students to think more critically about issues. Colleges also clearly need to protect speakers from being disrupted and prevented from speaking, even as such incidents have been few compared to the number of speakers invited to campuses across the country -- and have rarely occurred at the institutions slated to pay the endowment tax.

There's a lot of what I call Utopian Wonkery in that passage (policy x would lead to outcome y: the margin of error is important) and yet the sounds of a mugging by reality are so sweet.

Another vital move to turn the tide: do more for veterans. That could include recruiting a greater number of veterans as students and hiring more veterans as staff and faculty members. Support programs that benefit veterans would contribute to the diversity of experience and points of view on campuses, including among the faculty. Interestingly, student veteran groups have been effective at lobbying Congress on policies that affect them. If student veterans had a greater presence at the colleges and universities subjected to the endowment tax, and felt that those institutions were going all out to assist student veterans and hire returning ones, could they have helped eliminate this provision from the tax bill?

The "missing veteran" problem is the dual of the U.S. News problem: if you think of "gap year" as something a well-connected kid does to make the application look better or to find himself, rather than as a hitch in service, you've probably got some privilege to check.  You won't find the veterans at the Ivies, for the most part.

It is a public relations problem for the institutions favored in the U.S. News league table, but it's not because the public isn't well informed.

The strategy of relying on lobbying to undo the harm of the endowment tax bill was based on the assumptions that the public was misinformed and that the problem was mostly a public relations issue. That may be true in part. But the best approach that these institutions could take to win back support is to clearly demonstrate, through a set of actions, that they are listening and committed to doing a better job of serving the public good -- by bringing on more intellectual diversity, more low- and middle-income students, and more veterans.

No, we understand the situation fully. The policy of Prestige Education has been to turn out Wise Experts to Rule The World, because they alone understand what that Public Good is.

They've done a piss-poor job with that policy.  We object to business as usual.