Last summer in The New York Times, Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of San Diego, took several big-name schools to task for the ways that they handle their endowments. Fleischer cited Harvard, the University of Texas, Stanford and Princeton — but he reserved his harshest criticism for Yale University, which he says pays private equity firms $480 million a year to handle its endowment. Meanwhile, he says the school spends only $170 million dollars on financial aid for students — while tuition constantly rises.

“As some of these endowments grow larger and larger, the group that benefits the most is not students; it’s not faculty. It’s the fund managers who manage the money,” Fleischer says. “What is the endowment there to serve? It should be to advance teaching, research and scientific inquiry.” He points to the ways the universities managed their money during the tough financial losses of the financial crisis. “It’s striking that, in those circumstances, where you would expect the universities to tap into the endowment for a lot of support, they didn’t. Instead, the focus was on growing the endowment back to the previous size.”

Malcolm Gladwell, the author and New Yorker writer, commented: “Is our educational system better or worse off for having a small number of schools with a massive amount of money, and a very large number of schools who are hurting? There are tons of students at other colleges who are carrying enormous debt loads through their 20s and even into their 30s because school has gotten so expensive. I think Yale should say, at the very least, “We do not deserve to have tax-exempt status for our endowments. It’s one thing if a school has an endowment of $500 million that they are stretching a million different ways to meet the needs of its students, to say that as a society, we should allow them to escape taxes so they can spend their money on education. That logic does not hold when you’ve got $35 billion in the bank, as Harvard does. I think people are free to pay money managers what money managers charge, and money managers are free to do with their money whatever they want. The issue is that all of this circular system is tax-deductible. You and I, and everyone else in America, are subsidizing this activity.”

A group called Nexus calculated the per student annual taxpayer contribution for different kinds of educational institutions in the US. For the typical community college in this country, it comes out to [between $2,000 and] $4,000 per student per year. For a typical state school, it’s $10,000 per year. For Harvard, it’s $48,000 per year, for Yale,$69,000 per student per year, and for Princeton, it’s $105,000 per student per year of taxpayer subsidy. There’s something wrong with a society that spends 50 times more subsidizing the students at Princeton than it does subsidizing the students of a typical community college. That’s wrong.

The Metro Section of the Washington Post on February 16 carried an article asking “When  things started going downhill” (it was a tongue-in-cheek article, and quite amusing).

A Mr. Norm Phlion complained that the decline of American civilisation began when Johnson & Johnson removed the tiny red thread from Band-Aid wrappers that made applying a bandage to a bleeding wound quick and easy. “You could well bleed to death before the bandage is available to do its work,” he wrote.

Bingo! For the same reason I will not use Band-Aids.  Instead, I use Elastoplast, a British product that used to be made of stretchy fabric that withstood water and rough treatment.  Alas, I recently discovered that they have radically changed the product.  They have tightly encapsulated each small bandage in sealed plastic that you can’t open. You have to find a pair of scissors, cut right round the plastic and pry the bandage out.  By which time there is blood all over everything. To make matters worse the bandage is no longer made of the old fabric and comes off in no time, especially when moistened.  Usage high, utility pathetic.

Why is this petty matter on an Epicurean  site, you might ask.  Well, the trend is towards cheaper raw materials and easier, automated production, and added profit without stopping to think about the end user, eho is standing there getting blood on his clothes and using three strips of bandage for wounds that used to be dealt with by one.  Secondly, for the injured person the new bandaging from the 2 major global manufacturers does nothing for calm and peace of mind. From all corners we are being duped.

Psychiatrists now call disabling grief after the death of someone you are close to “pathological”.  This is after only two months after the death. In a book called “Death’s Summer Coat” Brandy Schillace comments,”The modern Westerner has lost loss; death as a communal event, and mourning as a communal practice, have been steadily killed off.” The success of specialised medicine and the development of institutionalised care mean that fewer of us look after the sick and dying at home.  People are no longer able, organised or even prepared to accommodate a dying relative at home.  Palliative care can mean that, once a doctor has decided he or she can do nothing more to help the patient, the latter is wheeled off to a separate part of the hospital and that is the last you see of them alive.  It is care-less, businesslike, and rather brutal. It leaves normal, caring people in shock and often feeing guilty that it all ended so clinically, and that they had done so little to show love and care.

I believe that grieving continues in stop/start fashion for many years and is natural. My own parents died nearly twenty five years ago, and yet they are seldom out of my thoughts in one context or another. This is, I’m sure, human and totally normal. And like many other people I dearly wish I could have done something more to show my love and to make their last days more care-filled and dignified. Were I to be asked for life advice by a young person, one of the things I would say is, “Be careful that, when your parents face death, you do everything you can to show your care and love; if not, a feeling of guilt will never leave you. Death takes but a short time; the memory of it stays with you for life.”