To the Editor:
Discussion of President Shirley Ann Jackson’s Adirondack retreat seems to be missing an important point. As any homeowner knows, the original cost of a property is a fraction of its actual long-term cost. A house must be kept heated, lighted, cleaned, and maintained. Roof gutters must be cleared of leaves and debris. Woodwork must be painted, leaky faucets fixed, squeaky door-hinges oiled, furnace filters replaced. Driveways must be plowed and walkways shoveled. Landscaped areas must be planted, pruned, weeded, mowed, watered, and raked. If there are wooded areas, they must be kept free of deadfalls and brush. The place must be kept secure and safe, and insurance bills must be paid. As the late Gilda Radner used to say, it’s always something.
Given that the retreat is in a remote area accessible to wildlife (including the two-legged variety) and is subject to severe weather, the cost of all this routine work must be significantly greater than the work for an equivalent property in Loudonville or Clifton Park. And since we can presume that the president and any other dignitaries using the retreat are not expected to prepare their own meals and do their own laundry and vacuuming, the cost of providing these services must be covered as well.
A ballpark estimate of the combined annual costs of maintaining the retreat is $50,000. The donor of a property such as this one might make the gift cost-neutral for the Institute by donating with it endowment funds sufficient to provide annual income to cover the maintenance and operating costs. At a drawdown rate of 5-percent, that donation would have to be at least $1 million. In responding to campus concerns about the retreat, no administrator has mentioned any corresponding gift to endowment, so we should assume that there was none.
The recurring costs of maintaining and operating the retreat have presumably been folded into some larger slices of the Institute’s total annual budget, where they would be dwarfed by figures with one or two more zeroes. And that unnoticeable $50,000 might be a worthwhile investment, depending on what use(s) the retreat has been put to, but we have no way of knowing what those uses are.
On the other hand, $50,000 might have covered the salary and benefits of one of the staff members who was fired in December.
Michael Halloran
Professor Emeritus
