USC pays out $1.1 billion: should universities shut down health clinics?

I’ve long been an advocate for universities shutting down dormitories. Why take responsibility for what 18-22-year-olds do when they’re not in class? Build shared spaces for students to work together, not spaces for students to sleep together, party, etc. This goes double for the Age of Coronapanic. In addition to purporting to be students’ educators, universities have taken it on themselves to become students’ jailers (see College Today: Exercise by going to your twice-weekly COVID-19 test).

Recently we’ve learned that University of Southern California has lost 20 percent of its endowment as a predictable consequence of running its own health clinic: “USC agrees to $1.1 billion in settlement with hundreds of women alleging abuse by gynecologist” (NBC):

A Los Angeles County Superior Court approved a deal Thursday that would give 710 women who alleged that they were abused by Tyndall an $852 million settlement. That is in addition to a $215 million settlement that was given final approval last year as part of a different federal class action lawsuit.

(That’s $1.55 million to each survivor, equivalent to 33.3 years of median pre-tax earnings of Americans who work full-time and identify as “women”. Since the money will be tax-free and the typical American who identifies as a “woman” does not work full-time year after year (see “Women with elite education opting out of full-time careers” (Vanderbilt) for example), $1.55 million is more than a median American woman would earn via a lifetime of W-2 wages.)

The university administrators haven’t lost their ability to lie. From “U.S.C. Agrees to Pay $1.1 Billion to Patients of Gynecologist Accused of Abuse” (NYT):

In a letter to students and alumni, the president of the university Carol L. Folt said, “These events have been devastating for our entire community.”

Dr. Folt also said the university would fund the settlement over two years through a combination of “litigation reserves, insurance proceeds, deferred capital spending, sale of nonessential assets, and careful management of nonessential expenses.” She added that no philanthropic gifts, endowment funds or tuition would be redirected to pay the costs.

This makes as much sense as saying “I didn’t use our household funds to pay for that case of booze; I used money that I won from a scratch-off lottery ticket.”

Readers: What is the upside for a university or college in running its own clinic? Given that academic administrators are selected for their skill at harvesting tax dollars (tuition subsidies, student loans, research grants), how could anyone ever have expected them to properly supervise something complex such as health care delivery? If the goal is to have convenient primary care available, wouldn’t it make more sense to offer low-cost leases to unaffiliated providers?

5 thoughts on “USC pays out $1.1 billion: should universities shut down health clinics?

  1. I suspect the reason USC chooses to run its own health clinic has to do with the complicated details of the funding they receive from the State of California and the Federal government to do so; there is nothing of any magnitude USC does if it doesn’t involve large sums of Other People’s Money. It beggars belief that the clinic was in any way a money-losing proposition for the University – until now, that is.

    USC is all about connections to the happy people.

    “The scandal, which forced the university’s president at the time, C.L. Max Nikias, to resign under pressure, erupted a year after U.S.C. was embroiled in another scandal, when the popular dean of the medical school was fired after being accused of using drugs and partying with prostitutes.”

    Even after Mr. Nikias was forced out, scandals, big and small, continued to engulf the university, **once regarded as a party school for Los Angeles’s elite before it was transformed into a top-tier university with an endowment to rival Dartmouth’s and a faculty that included several Nobel laureates.**

    Yeah, well, you don’t get transformed from a party school into a top-tier University by not taking lots of money for everything you touch, including your health clinic.

    Separately, from the NBC article, I’ll leave it up to other people to write the jokes:

    “Audry Nafziger described herself as one of Tyndall’s first victims during a news conference Thursday, saying that she first saw Tyndall in 1990 when she was a young woman and that she had had no previous experience with a gynecologist.

    “I thought it was odd, but what did I know?” Nafziger said. “When he took his camera out to take pictures of me and asked me to participate in those photos, well, what did I know? … I trusted him.”

    Nafziger, who is now a sex crimes prosecutor, said the incident changed her life entirely, from her lack of trust in male doctors to the way she looked at herself.”

    Yeah, every time I got to the doctor’s office and he asks me to strip down, put on a thong and hold his stethoscope while he takes some pictures, I just don’t know what to do….

    • I sit here in amazement and horror reading this conclusion from the NYT piece: Honestly, I think we’ve all long since crossed the event horizon into some living Voltairean nightmare:

      “The behavior that was discovered shocks the conscience of the university to its core,” Rick Caruso, chair of the university’s board of trustees, said in a statement. “Our institution fell short by not doing everything it could to protect those who matter most — our students, and I am sorry for the pain this caused the very people we were obligated to protect.”

      It has shocked them all the way to their utterly rotten core.

      https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Moreau_Monkeys_crop.jpg#/media/File:Moreau_Monkeys_crop.jpg

    • >I suspect the reason USC chooses to run its own health clinic has to do with the complicated details of the funding they receive from the State of California and the Federal government to do so.

      I can only speak first-hand about what goes on in primary and secondary education.

      First, you need a health clinic to administer all the meth — whoops — ADHD drugs that a quarter of kids are on. Then there are all the happy pills that the kids are on to deal with their depression. And then there’s the counselors and “occupational therapists” needed to work them through a battery of new syndromes and disabilities across the spectrum of various ailments. Thar’s money in tham thar autists!

      Also, while disciplining unruly children is frowned upon, throwing a medical label on children gives schools license to lock them up without judicial review.

      The Educational-Industrial Complex has co-opted the Medical-Industrial Complex with a rapacity that would make Ike’s Military-Industrial Complex blush.

      Show me five high-performing kid, and I promise you at least two are either on uppers, happy pills, or diagnosed with some disability that allows them “accomodations”.

  2. USC has a large medical school, I would expect the clinic is part of their facilities for training doctors and other medical professionals.

  3. I didn’t go into the specifics of the case, but according to one article I read, the administrators were made aware of the behavior but suppressed it, presumably to avoid scandal, same as the Catholic Church, the Olympic Team, the college football guy…

    Maybe $1.1bn is the magic number for administrators to stop going along to get along.

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