🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May22.123607.3430@athena.cs.uga.edu> mcovingt@athena.cs.uga.edu (Michael A. Covington) writes:
>  (smile)  You obviously have no idea how a university is financed.
>  If each student had to pay his share of running the university,
>  tuition would be $100,000 to $200,000 per year, or more.
>
[...]
>  The rest of us have many funding sources:
>    -- Tuition (this is a small to negligibly small part of it);
>    -- Grants and research contracts (this pays for a whopping large
>	 part of the computer facilities at most institutions);
>    -- The endowment (in the case of most good private universities,
>	 this consists of a large collection of investments that produce
>	 large income every year);
>    -- Subsidy by state legislature (in the case of most state universities,
>	 this covers a LARGE part of the operating expenses, IN ADDITION
>	 to income from the endowment [=land grant]).

As someone who used to be a student and is now on the other side of the
question as a large lab administrator, I've thought about this a bit.

It's certainly true that the students themselves don't pay the bills for
the facilities.  But, without the students the school wouldn't be able to
get the grants needed to fund labs like the IPL.  So, I feel that telling 
them all to take a flying leap and go buy their own computers is rather 
naive.  Besides, the whole point of a university is to let people learn.

But, I'm curious about the general opinon of people here in this group.
Is this going to be a place for continuous petty spouting of rules and 
regulations and rebuttals?  Doesn't sound all that interesting.  Then
again, I suppose that would be what would be discussed in comp.unix.policy.
Is there a charter somewhere?  (What's the policy on asking for charters? ;)

-- 
Rodney