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Andreessen's point might not be that the government should force them to do anything necessarily, but that no one even expects them to do anything. They have 40

Andreessen's point might not be that the government should force them to do anything necessarily, but that no one even expects them to do anything. They have 40 billion dollars in the bank. No one expects them to do anything with it. The government, donors, anyone in Harvard, the proverbial man on the street, none has an expectation that they should try to do anything greater than whatever they're doing now.

pmarca 6y ago
Yes, exactly.
bhl 6y ago
The "nobody expects anything from Harvard" statement might be a bit too strong. I've seen people say that Harvard has a responsibility to do more social good with it's massive endowment. Here's one example [1]: > Endowments over $1 billion should be taxed if the university doesn’t grow freshman seats at 1.5x the rate of population growth. Harvard, MIT, and Yale have combined endowments (approximately $85 billion) greater than the GDP of many Latin American nations. So maybe the issue isn't with expectations, but with incentives: to effect change in these old hierarchical systems, you need elitists to be anti-elitist; to make decisions against one's interests for the betterment of others. [1] https://www.profgalloway.com/how-i-got-here https://www.profgalloway.com/how-i-got-here