Tax university endowments?

The latest in the inevitable backlash against decades of inflation-outstripping tuition increases:

Massachusetts lawmakers desperate for additional revenue are eyeing the endowments of deep-pocketed private colleges to bolster the state's coffers by more than $1 billion a year, asserting that the schools' rising fortunes undercut their nonprofit status.

Legislators have asked state finance officials to study a plan that would impose a 2.5 percent annual assessment on colleges with endowments over $1 billion, an amount now exceeded by nine Massachusetts institutions. The proposal, which higher education specialists believe is the first of its kind across the country, drew surprising support at a debate on the State House budget last week and is attracting attention in higher education circles nationally. . .

"When is a nonprofit not a nonprofit because of the wealth they are acquiring?" said Representative Paul Kujawski, a Democrat from Webster and chief backer of the legislation.

"It's mind boggling that one entity not paying taxes has $34 billion. How do you justify that?" said Kujawski, who serves on the influential House Ways and Means Committee.

Harvard and its brethren have really brought this upon themselves. I rather doubt that this proposal would ever have been made had there not been such a history of disproportion between the size of the largest endowments and the draw applied to paying educational expenses. When so much institutional income has been directed to institutional growth, one wonders whether the non-profit label is at all meaningful.

In addition to Harvard, the legislation would affect Amherst College, Boston College, Boston University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Smith College, Tufts University, Wellesley College, and Williams College.

Full article in the Boston Globe.

UPDATE: A concise and cogent response to the opponents of taxation here. Many of the anti-tax statements were pretty ludicrous, and deserved to be slapped down hard. One of the comments not addressed was the claim that taxation would lead to less financial aid for needy students -- basically a threat on the order of, "make us cut some fat, and we'll take out the meat".

Don't forget the tapeworms

Seven German artists are living with lice in their hair in an Israeli museum for three weeks in the name of art.

The Berliners aim to stretch boundaries of what is art, saying they are toying with ideas about hosts and guests in line with a theme set by the museum.

"The idea is that we live in the museum as their guests, and at the same time we are hosting lice on our heads," said artist Vincent Grunwald, 23.

Now isn't that thought-provoking? From the BBC.

Vivaldi redivivus

A long-lost opera by the Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi has been performed for the first time in 278 years, in the city of Prague.

Argippo was written for the Czech capital and premiered there in 1730.

But the opera - a tale of "passion, love and trickery" in an Indian maharaja's court -- later disappeared without trace.

Most of the score was discovered in Germany by a young Czech musician who completed the missing parts.

Full story here.

Lingua latina cyberspatiae

The Vatican didn't have a Latin version of their official website? Apparently not until now, according to the BBC. The Documenta Latin may be viewed here.

Startling headline

This is probably turning a lot of heads over at the BBC.

Spain vs Odyssey Marine

Spain demanded the return of sunken treasure worth an estimated half a billion dollars yesterday, accusing Odyssey, the deep-sea exploration company that discovered it, of looting its shipwrecks.

Spanish archaeologists said that they had determined "with complete certainty" that the record haul had come from the Spanish colonial-era galleon Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, sunk by a British fleet off the southern coast of Portugal in 1804. . .

Mark Pizzo, a US judge, ruled against Odyssey last month, ordering it to share information about the find with the Spanish. Yesterday Spain said that coins from the haul were documented to have been on the Mercedes, while the location of the find also indicated that it came from the galleon.

"The sinking of the Mercedes was a pivotal event in Spanish and European history, and the site and its contents are the inalienable historical heritage and patrimony of Spain," the Government said in court papers due to be filed today as part of a continuing trial to determine who owns the treasure. It added that it never authorised Odyssey to disturb the "gravesite of hundreds of Spanish sailors and their family members" who died when the ship sank.

From the Times of London.

Diving lessons for whales

Ancient whales were not master divers like their modern descendents. Biologists have discovered signs of decompression syndrome -- the bends -- in several different whale fossils, a finding that could revise the evolutionary history of deep diving.

A team of paleobiologists surveyed hundreds of modern and ancient whale skeletons for decompression syndrome, which occurs when quick pressure changes force air or fat bubbles out of blood vessels.

The full article is here; what is intriguing is the extent to which whales' ability to avoid the bends might be a matter of learned (and, implicitly, taught) technique.

Japan faces the abyss

Forget Godzilla -- it's the demographics:

Japan celebrated a national holiday on Monday in honor of its children. But Children's Day might just as easily have been a national day of mourning.

For this is the land of disappearing children and a slow-motion demographic catastrophe that is without precedent in the developed world. . .

Japan, now the world's second-largest economy, will lose 70 percent of its workforce by 2050 and economic growth will slow to zero, according to a report this year by the nonprofit Japan Center for Economic Research.

Population shrinkage began three years ago and is gathering pace. Within 50 years, the population, now 127 million, will fall by a third, the government projects. Within a century, two-thirds of the population will be gone.

In what is now being called a "super-aging" society, department and grocery stores have recorded declining sales for a decade -- and new car sales have fallen for 18 consecutive years.

From the Washington Post.