Ivy League school gave its former president a $3.7 million home loan with 0.38% interest
Christopher Tremoglie
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College tuition prices are at an all-time high, burdening families with debt for decades. Student loan forgiveness has been hotly debated in the public sphere and Congress. Very rarely, if ever, are colleges and universities ever blamed for their roles in the tuition and student loan debt crisis.
Many solutions have been offered to solve this societal dilemma. However, very rarely do universities, and what they spend their money on to cause tuition to be so expensive, receive any blame. However, after the revelation of the lucrative financial package the University of Pennsylvania gave to its former president, it’s officially time to question how exactly these institutions of higher learning are using their money.
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The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the affluence of the University of Pennsylvania’s former president, Amy Gutmann. The newspaper revealed that Gutmann, one of the country’s highest-paid administrators, received a payout of nearly $23 million in her final year at the school. She was given a $3.7 million, 0.38% interest home loan from the Ivy League university. It raises the question: How much of those funds could have paid for the tuition of students instead of going to the university’s president?
I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania when Gutmann was president. I couldn’t get a loan to attend the school with only 0.38% interest, nor could any other student, to my knowledge. As the Inquirer reported, nothing was illegal about any of this. However, these lucrative financial perks and benefits are not a good look when the ordinary family pays hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition to send their children to Penn. The newspaper noted that “some academics question whether they are financially sound and politically palatable for higher education institutions.”
Additionally, the Ivy League university has come under fire for other decisions the school made while Gutmann was at the helm. For example, after the Obama administration ended in 2016, Joe Biden was named an honorary professor at the school in 2017. The university then opened the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in 2018 — despite Biden not having any previous affiliation with UPenn.
Biden was paid $900,000 from 2017 to 2019 by the school as the Penn Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor — despite never teaching a class at the college. Even more puzzling, the average salary of a Penn professor during that time who actually taught classes was $217,000 a year. Furthermore, after Biden became president in Jan. 2021, Biden named Gutmann the United States Ambassador to Germany. That seems like an awful lot of money and favors being exchanged between Biden and Gutmann.
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At a time when tuition to attend the University of Pennsylvania was approximately $70,000 a year, the school spent millions of dollars on the salary of the university’s president and a professor who never taught at the school being paid significantly more than actual professors. As families are saddled with debt and economic difficulties, such as high-interest rates due to recent hikes, Penn’s former president lived like an affluent aristocrat, above the common fray and ordinary folk.
Biden’s cushy job and Gutmann’s financial favors show that there are two Americas in this country. There’s one for the elite, affluent, aristocratic class for people like Gutmann and Biden. And another for the ordinary, regular people who pay tuition at Penn to fund the lives of people like Gutmann and Biden.