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Recession leads to strategic shift




Thursday, June 11, 2009


By: Eric Messinger
President, other administrators discuss thinking behind cuts

The economic downturn has had a significant impact on Stanford’s budget, but with the dust settling on some of the largest changes, the cuts have become far clearer.As reported, Stanford’s budget for 2009-2010 projects a 30 percent loss in value for the University endowment. Administrators have also emphasized that due to this drop in value, and the necessity of covering funding shortfalls that must be maintained even before they might be cut, levels of spending from the endowment must rapidly reduce. Already, the University plans to move for its 2010-2011 budget to pay out 15 percent less per endowment share.This dramatic loss in endowment value, and consequent necessity to reduce endowment spending to sustainable levels, has forced many specific cuts in University units and schools to conform to reduced funding.Cutting the budget has also, however, initiated a strategic response from high-level University administrators, which is playing out in a variable manner.In an interview with The Daily, President John Hennessy reiterated that given the loss, Stanford would have to adjust itself to a new paradigm, and not focus upon returning to the same conditions that existed prior to the recession.“If you said that to continue operations we have to replenish the whole endowment before we do anything else, that could take a decade or two,” Hennessy said.He added that he hoped the University would be able to transition rapidly into a growth mindset.“We want to focus on new things, rather than replenishing the endowment coffers,” Hennessy said.Hennessy also emphasized the value of “doing this in a way that forces people to contemplate the scale and scope of the cut........
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The Obama administration’s sweeping new proposal to restrict executive pay is likely to be a humbling exercise for seven of the nation’s largest companies, which have received billions of dollars in federal assistance to survive the economic crisis.
As for me, Social Security was cut two times in the last few months.The people that know how to trick and rob others, steal, cheat and to get more than their share!
Their lies, propaganda and advertising have cause the poor that they were right and persuaded them to voluntarily give up some of the few things they had to make them even poorer and the rich even richer, so the rich could have more and more and the poor less and less!
Ted Rudow III,MA