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My understanding is that ivy league schools have impossibly huge coffers, and this seems to boil down to money.

Or perhaps MIT is offering a bad deal on purpose to sink negotiations?

MIT isn't in the Ivy League. The Ivy League, which is an athletic conference, consists of Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

How big are its coffers though?

- Mit: $26.4B

- Yale: $42.3B

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University_endowment https://news.mit.edu/2022/endowment-2022-1007

Endowments are independently run and the last thing the money men would do is give the admins or academics a say, or they’d fritter it all in short order, like how Larry Summers lost Harvard a cool billion dollars through ill-judged investment strategies for its operating funds.

I don't think they do? They have large endowments, but they have to preserve those mostly, and the number of things they have to pay for is huge. They're still run like an organization that has to be accountable to its budget.

Also, MIT isn't Ivy League, technically.

It's worse than that, most endowment funds are earmarked for specific purposes.

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