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A Christmas carol for the new gilded age

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festivus

Recently New York University, the real estate investment consortium disguised as the nation’s most expensive undergraduate school, has been getting some bad publicity, for engaging in orgies of spending while some of its students are forced to turn to prostitution to make those pesky tuition and rent payments.

Apparently undeterred by grumblings from the tenantry, the school’s administrators have decided to bestow an especially thoughtful Christmas gift on their newest member:

New York University is known for bestowing lavish perks on its leaders. Its new president, Andrew Hamilton, will be no exception.

Anticipating his January arrival from the University of Oxford, where he has been vice chancellor, N.Y.U. has been completely renovating a 4,200-square-foot penthouse duplex with four bedrooms, four and a half bathrooms and an expansive rooftop terrace. The apartment is in a landmark building at 37 Washington Square West in Greenwich Village, and it will be Dr. Hamilton’s residence, a university spokesman said.

Described by the university as “swanky” in its prior incarnation as a ceremonial presidential home, the apartment will be more opulent after the transformation, which includes moving a staircase and some existing walls and installing a new kitchen. The cost? At least $1.1 million, possibly double — raising questions as N.Y.U. and other universities are under pressure to control costs and high tuition.

The 19th and topmost floor of the building will be turned into a master-bedroom suite, where Dr. Hamilton will have private exits — one from the bedroom and one from the bathroom — onto a terrace overlooking Washington Square and, to the south, the financial district skyline, according to documents filed with New York City. . .

Documents filed with the city certify the project’s expense at $1.1 million, or about $260 a square foot. Contractors and architects suggested that the final sum could be double that, not including interior decorating.

“I think realistically it would be in the $500-a-foot range,” said Cesar Trevino, whose company, InTrevco, specializes in residential construction in New York. A Manhattan architect familiar with these kinds of projects, Ted Porter of Ryall Porter Sheridan Architects, estimated the price of a midrange renovation in New York at $400 to $600 per square foot.

The potential cost was enough to raise questions from Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, the chairwoman of the Higher Education Committee, whose district includes Greenwich Village.

“I don’t think it’s atypical at any university that there are changes to the president’s residence,” Ms. Glick, a Democrat, said. “The question is, how much did it cost and was that unseemly? Certainly to the average person, and perhaps to the people who are paying their kids’ tuition, which is already pretty eye-popping, that would seem like a high figure.”

The New York Times disclosed in 2013 that top N.Y.U. administrators and faculty members had been extended loans at extremely favorable terms — in some cases forgiving them over time — for vacation homes in the Hamptons and on Fire Island, where John Sexton, the departing president, had a $1 million university loan for a beach house.

He also has the use of a university-owned Washington Square apartment, where he will remain after stepping down to rejoin the faculty. In addition to his base pay as president, which ranks in the top 10 nationally, he is entitled to a $2.5 million payout this year based on his length of service and $800,000 in annual retirement benefits.

And a merry Festivus to you too:

The one thing that everyone who has read A Tale of Two Cities remembers is the Reign of Terror. The whole book is dominated by the guillotine — tumbrils thundering to and fro, bloody knives, heads bouncing into the basket, and sinister old women knitting as they watch. Actually these scenes only occupy a few chapters, but they are written with terrible intensity, and the rest of the book is rather slow going. But A Tale of Two Cities is not a companion volume to The Scarlet Pimpernel. Dickens sees clearly enough that the French Revolution was bound to happen and that many of the people who were executed deserved what they got. If, he says, you behave as the French aristocracy had behaved, vengeance will follow. He repeats this over and over again. We are constantly being reminded that while ‘my lord’ is lolling in bed, with four liveried footmen serving his chocolate and the peasants starving outside, somewhere in the forest a tree is growing which will presently be sawn into planks for the platform of the guillotine, etc., etc., etc. The inevitability of the Terror, given its causes, is insisted upon in the clearest terms:

It was too much the way… to talk of this terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under the skies that had not been sown — as if nothing had ever been done, or omitted to be done, that had led to it — as if observers of the wretched millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming, years before, and had not in plain terms recorded what they saw.

And again:

All the devouring and insatiate monsters imagined since imagination could record itself, are fused in the one realization, Guillotine. And yet there is not in France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf, a root, a spring, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.

In other words, the French aristocracy had dug their own graves.

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