Dear Board of Visitors,
How have you been? Good! How’s the wife? Good! How’s the coal plant? Still running? Full blast you say? Okay, well, that’s less good.
I’m going to be honest — I don’t know you all very well. You’re kind of like God. Well, only Thomas Jefferson can be God, but you get the idea. I’m constantly interacting with stuff you created. I sometimes feel a little abandoned by you when things aren’t going well. And, once a year, you pick a new prodigal son to be eaten alive by the philistines. RIP Daniel Judge, former student member of the Board of Visitors.
Enough pleasantries. Let’s get down to business. Around two months ago, state auditors declared that the $2 billion “Strategic Investment Fund” was not what high school vice principal impersonator Helen Dragas claimed. The best nerds in the business did a full audit and came up with nothing legally reprehensible. Case closed!
Here’s the thing though. It was $2 billion. Billion. Like with the letter “B.” If that B were Sesame Street’s letter of the day, that homeless muppet would buy a condo in Beverly Hills, throw weekly ragers with Big Bird and do cocaine with Elmo everyday until she died. You could fill a super yacht with that much cash and sail away to freedom with your best friends wife. You could fill half of Kanye West’s mansion with that much cash and light that house on fire just for the story.
My point is that a cool couple billion seems a little excessive, don’t you think?
Now people way smarter than I am have explained how the Strategic Investment Fund works, why the size is necessary and what it has accomplished (thanks Dad, sorry I always slept through my econ classes). The fund’s immense, jaw-dropping, consultant-arousing liquidity was necessary for proper credit ratings. Those ratings, as any idiot who read the Wikipedia page for “The Big Short” could tell you, are necessary for big loans.
I’m still dissatisfied. Mostly because I still don’t get it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m dumb, but comprehension isn’t my issue — it’s a lack of information. Why did it have to be so large? And why do you keep asking my parents, my grandparents, my dog and me for more money? How do you even know my dog’s email (bowowtothequeen@gmail.com for those of you wondering)? Why are you still fundraising if you already have $2.3 billion?
That’s like if I were driving a dump truck of cocaine to my house but stopped at every sketchy street corner for more drugs until I had bought enough to fill a second dump truck. I would have too much cocaine. You, Board of Visitors, have too much cocaine.
Did you really need a whole $2.3 billion for the fund? Was there some magical cut off when you stopped? Did the fairy godmother of Wall Street appear, do some drugs (I’m sensing what my high school English teacher would call a theme), and then reminisce about her time in the Commerce School before telling you the fund was large enough for the University to be AAA rated?
Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that they could have gotten the proper rating and still received enormous returns from the fund even if it had only been a measly $2 billion. That’s still $300 million you could have used for literally anything else. That’s enough to pay for two new Rotundas, affordable mental health care for students and a prototype of the Iron Man armor the army’s been working on without breaking a sweat.
But you didn’t buy any of those things, did you?
Instead you used it on common sense investing. Slow, agonizing shifts, with the promise that you would eventually, maybe, allow proposals to shape how the profits would be used. After two of the most tumultuous years in our schools history and the imminent arrival of the bicentennial, the best purpose you could think of for millions of dollars was to make even more money. And you wonder how creativity suffers.
You think this argument’s unfair? You think it’s wrong? Explain it to me. Explain to me how the fund works. Explain why every last cent was necessary for the goals the fund set out to achieve. Explain how it relates to tuition, to the living wage campaign and to the enormous fundraising drive you’re about to undertake. I am too stupid to understand econ without help and I am coming to you, praying in your church for guidance or, at the very least, mercy.
Until that question is answered, here’s my ultimatum. Board of Visitors? You can either stop sending me emails asking for me to donate or you can prove to me that we need another $1.5 billion on top of the $2.3 billion we already have sitting in assets, but you can’t do both. Until that argument is made to me, stop trying to fill a second dump truck with cocaine. You already have one. And stop calling me.
All my love,
Connor
Connor McLean is a Humor writer.
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