The entire purpose of an endowment is to help a university weather lean years without gutting its core academic programs. Yet Harvard has chosen to protect its gold pile over its scholarship, famously behaving like a hedge fund with a school attached as an afterthought. As CFO Ritu Kalra put it, the endowment is “not a source of short-term relief but a covenant across generations.” Translated from administrative jargon, that means the priority is not education but to have as big a stream of income as possible that is shielded from the influence of donors, students, and government.

And right on cue, the university’s collapse into financialized pseudo-education is now being met with a political response that’s just as absurd. Two weeks ago, President Trump announced that Harvard had reached a tentative deal with his administration to restore $2.4 billion in frozen federal grants — on the condition that it spend $500 million to create a network of trade schools for mechanics to work on ‘‘automotive plant, motors, engines,’’ which doesn’t really make any sense to me, but okay. I mean, I think funding trade schools in general is a good idea, but I am not sure that forcing Harvard to run one at gunpoint makes sense.