Late Monday, Stanford Management Company released the investment figures from the 2010 fiscal year and the endowment figures for 2011. From this development, there is much in which we can take heart. The University’s 14.4 percent return on the Merged Pool (MP), the main pot of investment funds for the school, means that those controlling the purse strings of the Farm are doing a damn good job.

In addition, the endowment stands at a heady $13.8 billion, more than securing Stanford as one of the world’s richest institutions of higher education. Over the course of the 2009 fiscal year, the endowment plummeted from $17.2 to $12.6 billion. The fact we have recouped a significant portion of those losses in only a year is a very good sign. Provost Etchemendy, in his report to the Faculty Senate last spring, spoke of a nearing end to salary freezes. From this body of evidence, is not unreasonable to say that Stanford weathered the storm and is on its way back up.

But before we break out the bubbly and pass out the Cubans, there are still some deep, overriding issues that this University and its community must grapple with. While a 14.4 percent return on the Merged Pool is more than double the average for the past decade, the aforementioned fund lost a walloping 25.9 percent in 2009, and we are still not close to our overfilling coffers of the mid-2000s. Our endowment currently is only 80 percent as large as it was in 2008. It is lunacy to deny that Stanford is not absurdly well-off. But after a freeze on faculty salaries, one of the third rails of the academy, and a halt or delay on a great many construction projects, the effects of the recession remain with us.

This increasingly rosy but still muddled financial situation invariably leads to a discussion of prioritization. For myriad reasons, the average Stanford student will not have a chance to substantively impact the course of budget decisions made by administrators. For those who were on campus during the 2009 school year, it is not difficult to recollect the sheer amount of hours student government poured into lobbying, pleading and even slightly cajoling the administration to take into consideration some of the issues central to the student body. And while some small successes were achieved, they were by and large peripheral to bigger and more daunting issues.

Stanford, as a center of higher learning, is tasked first and foremost with educating students. But at a university as complex as ours, we need to realize we are merely part of a much larger equation.

That is no excuse to simply check out. Rather, this should motivate a greater contemplation of what, exactly, the Stanford experience entails. The Farm likes to tout itself as a research university, but then why hasn’t research funding (ignoring stimulus funding) substantively increased over the last half decade?

As this school year progresses, take time to think and talk about what makes Stanford…well, Stanford. Is it your peers, many of whom are here because Stanford’s financial aid is paying their bills? Is it the professors and TAs, whose positions and fiscal security have been precarious for the past year? Is it the physical residences in which you live, many of which are in states of disrepair? Or could it be your student groups, which have been impacted by the reduced hours of Student Affairs? As a university, we must not shirk from frankly and openly discussing these matters, because the choices made now will affect the long term course of this institution.