Hi there, Larry.

You’re the guy who used to sign the money, right? Yeah, I thought so. That’s a good thing. See, we have a lot of money here—$19 billion in endowment, give or take the GDP of a couple of island nations here and there. Our last president, Neil “Take the Money and Run” Rudenstine, did a really good job of fundraising and was lucky enough to preside over a big bull market that gave us that 19 followed by nine zeroes.

Since we’ve got that cash, and since we’re not going to be making much money in the markets over the next few years, I think you’ll agree it’s time to focus on spending funds rather than raising them. Sure, Harvard’s been spending money recently—just look at our “Little Dig,” the Widener renovation, and you’ll see plenty of Benjamins flying out the windows. But why aren’t we spending money on undergraduates? No, Larry, Loker Commons absolutely does not count. Neil tried that argument too.

Now, I know you’ve already said you want to expand the Faculty, and I applaud you for that. But that means getting various departments to actually hire people. I don’t know—maybe you have experience herding cats and can pull it off. Still, it’s like Henry Kissinger ’50 said: “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

With that in mind, and with that $19 billion burning a hole in your pocket, here are some other ways you might spend Harvard’s money.

Buy the world a coursepack.

It’s been a while since you’ve hung around campus, Larry, so I’ll bet you didn’t know that our coursepacks cost a fortune nowadays. Some classes, including a lot of the biggest Cores, have coursepacks that cost $150 or more. This may not seem like a lot of money to a guy who bailed out the economies of Thailand, South Korea and Russia in the same year, but to us undergrads, that’s a lot of dough—over 15 hours of work on Dorm Crew. No coursepack is worth cleaning toilets for the better part of a day. You’d have 6,700 new best friends if you subsidized the cost of coursepacks (most of which is intellectual property anyways), or even better, if you ordered all faculty to use e-reserves, which store the texts online and allow us free retrieval. Free. That’s a nice word. Say it with me, Larry: “Free coursepacks.”

Simplify and expand financial aid.