Fact: "The universities are now poor"

There isn't much new in this story, but some of the quotes and facts are interesting and further make the point that it is likely to be a long, long time before Harvard builds anything new in Allston or even contemplates anything like what it had been planning for the past several years.

• “We can’t discount the fact that the universities are now poor,” - Robert Merton, the John and Natty McArthur University Professor at the Harvard Business School and 1997 winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics
• Stanford estimates that it may take more than 15 years for its endowment to return to the $17.2 billion peak reached in August 2008
• Yale, whose endowment was approx. $16B in June 2009, estimates that it will take more than 10 years for it to grow back to its June 2008 value of $23B.
• Harvard will “have to reshape and reset to being more like a $24 billion university than a $36 billion university,” President Drew Faust said in May
• "Efforts to shrink budgets are being complicated by the unending competition for the best students" which suggests that Harvard will prioritize projects like renovating undergraduate housing in Cambridge over building science labs in Allston

Endowment Losses From Harvard to Yale Force Cuts (Update1) - Bloomberg.com