Bob Samuels has written a well-researched article on the flow of money into and within universities, carefully dissecting how student tuition and humanities departments are actually the supporters of university research activities (by virtue of using tuition as collateral as well as providing cheap labor for most of the undergraduate instruction) rather than the other way around, as is usually suggested. We would disagree with his suggestion of more assessment (see Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism for more details about the problems of higher education assessment in the UK context), but agree whole heartedly with the idea of creating separate teaching and research faculty; it is exactly this idea that we put forth at our undergraduate institution as a way of dealing with abyssmally poor instruction. However, we worry that none of his suggestions will come to pass until those who were responsible for getting us into this mess are held accountable.

This article in Bloomberg’s goes into great detail regarding the problems faced by Harvard due to their toxic interest rate swaps. The issue came to the fore when interest rates dropped and Harvard was forced to post massive amounts of cash collateral. Disturbing for us as well is the following information: “Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, posted $38 million of collateral on $1.5 billion of swaps, according to a Moody’s report on the Ivy League School.”

While indeed these instruments seem to offer the promise of cheaper investment costs, at what real cost do they come? As Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, says in the article, “We shouldn’t be in the banking business, we should be in the education business.” Of course we would remove the second word “business”, but that is beside the point for the moment…

Harvard, like Cornell, was forced to sell billions of dollars worth of bonds in order to unwind these toxic investments, as well as provide cash for day-to-day operating experenses. Audaciously, “Harvard and JPMorgan celebrated the bond issue by hosting a cocktails-and-dinner party at the French restaurant Mistral, in Boston’s South End neighborhood, where appetizers start at $15 and entrees cost about $40, according to e-mails obtained from the state finance agency. JPMorgan invoiced the agency $388.78 for three employees who attended….”

As you may have noticed, we have taken an interest in following the precipitous fall of Harvard’s endowment as an index of the ways in which Wall Street-style investment strategies infiltrated the university. Today there is an article in the Boston Globe about how former President Lawrence Summers (now an advisor to Obama) failed to listen to the endowment managers themselves regarding concerns about the stability of the market. Greed is what brought the financial “crisis” to the university; greed pure and simple. And why do these people still get to remain on the payroll, while students, faculty, and staff have to accept the brunt of the pain?

I prerecorded a presentation for the SLSA 2009 conference as I was unable to attend in person.

As we have been saying since the beginning of the project, we have had much doubt regarding the existence of the “financial crisis” within universities. And now Marc Bousquet points to work by Howard Bunsis, treasurer of the American Association of University Professors , that points out that all the consternation about the “fiscal crisis” might be much ado about nothing. Indeed, Bunsis shows, according to Bousquet, that “at many schools, tuition and other revenue is up, or existing reserves could easily cushion the shortfall.”

You can read the entire post at Bousquet’s blog, as well as a set of slides by Bunsis or his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education . I encourage you to do so, and to let others know about this work as well.

More information is coming out regarding the blunders that led to the tremendous decrease in not only Harvard’s endowment, but also its ability to pay day-to-day bills. According to a recent article in the Boston Globe, “The university disclosed yesterday that it had lost $1.8 billion in cash—money it relies on for the school’s everyday expenses—by investing it with its endowment fund, instead of keeping it in safe, bank-like accounts.” Evidently they moved the day-to-day money into endowment management as a way of increasing its return…a bad idea at any time, but even worse when the market goes south. Harvard also disclosed that they lost $500 million when they had to pay a fee to get out of a pre-existing investment contract. I would like to know what measures are being taken at Harvard—and elsewhere—to prevent this from happening in the future. As we have said before: investing University money as if it is a Wall Street hedge fund is simply not proper (in the strongest sense of the word). People’s lives depend on this money, and taking risk profiles from Wall Street and implanting them in the University was one of the worst moves that could have happened.

We were pleasantly surprised tonight, while perusing our Facebook newsfeed, to see that MAICgregator was selected for this year’s electro_online exhibition. Thanks to Samuel Bruce, the curator of electro_online, for the selection! We’re happy to be in such good company as well. Wish we could be there in Newcastle for the full Electrofringe festival, but alas we’re on the other side of the world…

Update: Due to a slight bug we had to release a minor update; those of you who just installed 0.1.5 should get this update automatically.

We just released version 0.1.5 of MAICgregator…now with unnecessary animations!

Three main new features in this release:

• Toolbar button for easy turning on/off
• Trustee image replacement now searches all images, including those pesky CSS ones. Your page looks crazier than ever!
• The beginning of unnecessary Web 2.0 animations; coming next version: a new animated “redacted” mode! (Advanced setting only for this release; disabled by default.)

Any questions, comments, concerns, or rants to info [[at}} maicgregator d0t org.

I am quite pleased and honored that MAICgregator was featured in a recent article by Anna Munster entitled Data Undermining: The Work of Networked Art in an Age of Imperceptibility. Thanks Anna! This chapter is part of a larger project put together by Turbulence called networked: a (networked_book) about. The book features a number of contributions across a variety areas of networked artistic practice, as well as offering the space for inline commenting on the articles themselves. So if you want to contribute to the conversation, either on the piece involving MAICgregator, or any of the other ones, please do so!

Evidently there seemed to be some recent issues with MAICgregator. There was some “corruption” in the databases that I was luckily able to fix; unfortunately, the technologies that I use for the backend are well known for getting into a state that, to use a technical phrase, really messes things up. If you are having problems with MAICgregator (you get the error message “there seems to be some trouble with the tubes” or something like that), be sure to let us know by e-mailing info at maicgregator dot org.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled MAICgregating…