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Comment by chefandy | Hacker News Reader

It is funny when the dog catches its tail, but having worked for Harvard as an individual contributor for quite some time until recently, I think this is more an artifact of how many things Harvard does rather than some vast bureaucratic inefficiency. It's forestry program, pharmaceutical research, real estate development, giant dining organization, handful of public theaters, 72 (seriously) libraries, most being domain specific, police department that has the third largest jurisdiction in the state (on paper but they really only deal with university stuff,) their hospitals, and the zillions of other things they do can only take so much centralization. It's a bloated bureaucracy, for sure, but it doesn't hold a candle to The Fed, and IBM beats them both by a mile.

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But then ask why does Harvard need to do all of those things? European universities don't have dining organizations. They don't have police forces. They don't need much real estate development because they don't have this type of mission creep. And that's just out of the things you mentioned. There's a lot more fat to cut.

University police forces are common in the United States, and are an explicit legacy of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests, and the Kent State Massacre in particular. The idea is that the kids are less likely to be beaten or killed by police that answer to the university.

https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9069841/university-of-cincinna...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/09/colleg...

The marketing may be that interests align but the reality is that police that answer to the university will jump to answer calls that local police forces would get to when they get to, like petty theft of university property, public drunkenness, etc.

Transit police, university police, capitol police, boutique police forces like that exist for one reason and one reason only: to prioritize things that the police who would otherwise have jurisdiction would laugh at.

Universities are also generally exempt from all the taxes that pay for municipal police, so they provide their own.

It (sometimes) has a dual educational purpose where they run a law enforcement or criminal justice curriculum and the campus police service provides practical experience for students.

We had a great Atlanta PD major do a Q&A on the GT campus after a string of thefts/muggings.

She straight up said something to the effect of "I'm doing the best I can with the resources I have. Your zone also includes Midtown, with bars and commercial. If crime goes up there, owners with more political connections and tax revenue than the university gripe. So that's where most of my resources are."

Gotta respect honesty.

If you follow that to its logical conclusion the police would never show up in certain areas of the city. Personally I don't want my country to turn into Sao Paulo or Mexico City. Hell why not a subscription plan for the police? 911 please enter your customer credentials.

To some degree this already happens though it's less of a direct subscription or denial of services and more of a function of the taxes and connections in an area. Police officers often have entirely different response times, presence, escalation/deescalation strategies and enforcement policies for wealthy and poor parts of a city.

Good thing that crime rates are one of the few things that get people to vote in council elections.

>Hell why not a subscription plan for the police?

Because the people who currently have a lot of influence over current policing would be up in arms when that "certain neighborhood" police never show up in roll their own minimum viable solution that a) is not up to their standards b) they cannot exert political influence over.

Beyond that, you can't exactly cancel a subscription on the public servants you pay. It's not like cops are independent contractors.

>The idea is that the kids are less likely to be beaten or killed by police that answer to the university.

Kids not being beaten up or killed by the police in general wasn't an option?

Ideally, yes. But in the absence of wholesale reform, this does look like a pretty reasonable solution that could be implemented quickly.

So, a kludge

Somebody somewhere would be doing these things. Does it matter that that somebody is called “Harvard”? It’s not like it’s all run top-down; it’s just a bunch of affiliated organizations that have contractual relationships. I.e. an economy.

The people who run those theatres et al aren’t directly benefitting from the donations of Harvard alumni; they’re rather benefitting from the (presumably) Harvard College(s) of Performing Arts paying them for use of the space—same business model as any commercial theatre. Those affiliated businesses aren’t “Harvard” (the University) per se, any more than the people working for businesses in a food court in an airport work for the airport.

> Somebody somewhere would be doing these things

Yes, but Harvard duplicates existing services. e.g. when Harvard runs a dining org, that service is already provided by local restaurants and grocery stores. The only things Harvard needs to provide are things that you can't already get in Boston. Classrooms, libraries, labs, etc. It's just like engineering. Anything that can easily be offloaded to a third party tool should be.

Do those existing local businesses have the capacity to fulfil the customers that Harvard currently is, if Harvard were to suddenly tomorrow withdraw that service entirely?

Unless Harvard was to sell its facilities for someone else to operate, local businesses never could... Not without serious change in local governance. Not close to enough commercial space. You'd have to demolish a bunch of buildings to make larger facilities to handle the load.

Generic restaurants can't exclude non-Harvard students.

Presumptuous.

Also, opinion.

You seem to be missing that harvard attracts exceptional (and well connected) people. Expanding the business to suit their skills is a natural evolution.

>...dining...

Uh, Harvard throws a huge number of fund raising events that have to be catered and no one cares about the name of the catering company if the food is trash. It's in the best interest of Harvard to set their own standards for their events

They have a cafeteria, dining halls, and other eateries. Do you know how long it would take a student to walk off campus to a find a grocery store or restaurant? Sometimes quite a walk depending on your location

But you could say that about anything. If there's one restaurant in town and somebody opens up a second, you could say, "There was already a restaurant and you're just duplicating existing services." Yeah that's true, but so what? Same with Harvard. If they want to build services that compete with other local services, why is that worse than anyone else doing the same?

It is also pretty common for large companies in the US to have some sort of dining services, for what it’s worth. (I’m surprised this isn’t a thing in Europe, off the cuff “cafeteria” doesn’t look like an Americanism to me, but maybe it is).

Dining services for students make sense to me. Students are generally young folks with a lot going on. They might be on their own for the first time. It is helpful to have a place where they can just go grab some food without too much thought. Dining services might be priced into the student’s tuition, so parents can be confident that their kids will get meals, rather than spending their budget on partying, haha.

Plus, actually this is probably a more practical reason and I should have lead with it: dorms usually have limited cooking facilities. And imagine the messes which would be created in the shared kitchen, if everyone was using it. Eating out is nice, but most people don’t do it every day. Dining services handle the unexciting daily meals well — so really, this isn’t a redundant service to local restaurants.

I totally agree with you that providing healthy and affordable meals for the students is a very good idea. So let me tell you how that was and is organized in my alma mater, the Helsinki University.

Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.

Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.

Interesting. Actually I think there are shops and cafeterias that are student run at some US universities. It just doesn’t seem as widespread as what you describe. Health insurance seems like a high stakes thing to be student-run! Is it run entirely by current students or do alums help out?

In any case, I’m certainly not going to pretend that US students aren’t coddled a bit. School here has a been a little bit infected with the customer-service mentality… like pretty much everything else. It is what it is I guess.

Economies of scale diminish with size. Merge 1000 small companies? Huge benefit. Merge 10 big companies? Minor benefit, and sometimes the loss in specialization can actually be negative

Why are you suggesting it should be in this case? I reckon you are begging the question here.

Why would Harvard want to emulate European schools

Many tech businesses don't need to contribute to open source either, yet a significant amount of salary is lost to those employees who do.

Most companies contributing to open source do it either because they (1) consume projects directly or (2) want access to the community. For (1) it is no longer considered a waste of money as the corporation directly benefits from such changes. (2) is slightly harder to directly quantify however by opensourcing tools like tensorflow or react companies directly have access to talent pools which otherwise would not exist and they can cut costs on train ing. Its also free marketing for companies. In the end there really is no salary lost.

I suspect similar intangibles exist for Harvard.

That's another question That's much more complicated. The gp said they should cut their administrators not "Harvard should reduce services so they can then cut administrators"

A) United States universities offer a broader, more general education than the more compact, specialized education conferred by most European universities. B) Harvard's enrollment is more than 22k, many of whom live in campus dorms. That requires a lot of infrastructure. Plus it's a giant research organization with an endowment of 53 billion dollars. Centralizing makes complete sense in many areas. As any large organization does, they outsource things, like security patrols, when it works out better. C) They don't just do those things for the heck of it. The research alone contributes a huge amount to society, as do it's graduates. Those 72 libraries hold some of the world's most precious documents and objects. D) Saying that European universities simply don't have dining services that run their cafeterias and events shows you don't understand what the term dining services means. Lots of Harvard gatherings get food from local restaurants but sending thousands of residential freshmen into Harvard Square for breakfast every morning would be ludicrously inefficient. E) Tieing up Cambridge PD's officers responding to loud parties, petty theft, etc. would be dumb. Not having a centralized organization to handle or monitor crime that takes place in the many municipal jurisdictions that Harvard has facilities would also be dumb.

Harvard does have a large bureaucracy that could trim some fat, but your sweeping assumptions about what they don't need without even considering why they have them are pretty uninformed.

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