Michael Bloomberg is a very rich man. He has so much cash, even Scrooge McDuck is like, “Daaaaamn.” Someone can only spend so much skrilla on solid gold shirts and coin swimming pools before he or she feels a little dead inside, so our mayor spreading the wealth. Over the weekend, El Boombito donated 350 million dollars to his alma mater John Hopkins University. This brings his grand donation total to 1.1 billion dollars (!) over forty-nine years.
According to the New York Times, $100 million of Bloomberg’s donation will go to financial aid, while the other $250 million will be used to hire 50 professors “as they pursue research in areas like the global water supply and the future of American cities.” As members of a larger collegiate community, NYU should be really happy for Johns Hopkins (even though we’ll trash them later on our secret tumblr). But, like the good spoiled children that we are, we here at NYU Local are inclined to ask: Mr. Mayor, why not us?
It’s not like Hopkins is staying afloat on Bloomberg alone. The private university in Baltimore, Maryland boasts one of the largest endowments in the United States, locking in 2.5 billion in the 2011 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments. With a little over 7,000 undergrads and grads attending the university, the Hopkins administration is dropping $136,736 per student. While NYU may have a larger total endowment at 2.8 billion, we have five times as many students running around. This leaves us with $75,003 per student, ranked 163rd in the county.
The worst part is that JHU isn’t even using their cash correctly. Gothamist reports, “Hopkins alumnus Rebecca Fishbein seemed pleased with Bloomberg’s donation. “I’m just glad someone donated money to something useful. The last massive donation we got was to build a second museum for our lacrosse team.”
Listen, Bloomberg, NYU students don’t need much to be happy. We’re perfectly happy to spend our weekends with an Old English 40 and clothing recovered from our grandparents’ closets, complaining that we’re so broke right now because we don’t get the allowance from our trust until the 1st. We just need enough to make Mercer Hall seem less like a B-movie mad science lab. Or like, you know, financial aid would be cool too. We’ve been with you since the beginning, and we’ve been through hurricanes and soda wars together, and this is how you treat us? To paraphrase some wise men once said, cash rules everything around my tuition, and we just need some help.
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Acting as a devil’s advocate, he did graduate from Johns Hopkins, so it is likely for him to view his own school positively compared to other schools, including NYU.
“To paraphrase some wise men once said…”
Bloomberg said he’d only donate once you guys started proofreading. That being said: if NYU were given a chunk of change from Bloomy they’d probably spend it on a new underwater satellite campus in Dubai.