THE LAST ESCROW


or, something to think about when you see that next tuition increase.

Interesting tidbit in Saturday's Real Estate Transactions section of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Carnegie Mellon University just bought Professor Randy Pausch's old house. For $689,325.

The property, a single-family home on Ellsworth Avenue in Oakland, several blocks from campus on a street with no other Carnegie-Mellon-owned property, listed in C+ condition with 7 total rooms and 3-and-a-half baths on the Allegheny County web site, was assessed considerably lower. At $288,700.

Here's a photo:



I don't know about you, but I'm thinking that purchase price seems a tad excessive. And that the whole purchase seems a bit, well...

...odd. Untoward. Maybe even unsettling. But then I'm not exactly an unbiased observer.

What do you think? Does that look like a $689,000 house to you? Should Carnegie Mellon be in the business of buying -- much less overpaying for -- homes from its professors? Even if they are terminally ill and much-beloved? Do you think they'd pay over twice the market value for the house of one of their healthy professors? For the house of one of their healthy -- or even one of their terminally ill -- administrative assistants? Groundskeepers? Campus Police officers?

And what do you think they'll do with the home now that they own it? Find some other way to soak up the publicity or rake in the money from Professor Pausch's newfound fame? Keep it as some sort of maudlin, ghoulish shrine to his memory? Turn it into the Remember Randy Pausch and His Last Lecture Memorial Museum, charge admission to see where the poor man used to play with his children, then sell DVDs, t-shirts, and bumper stickers in a gift shop down in the old garage?

Whatever they do -- and they're staying uncharacteristically quiet about it for now -- I'm sure they'll come up with some way to further maximize the buzz and leverage the branding that this great sad story has brought to the coffers cachet credibility of the university. And if not, well, they can always raise tuition (yet again) to cover the loss.

Posted: Mon - December 17, 2007 at 01:13 AM          

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