Former Mayor Lori Lightfoot once told us that selling out Chicago’s future parking meter revenue to investors far from the city was perhaps the worst decision of municipal governance in the history of municipal governance.

She made a good case. Mayor Richard M. Daley’s 75-year deal, as we’ve said here many times, was an unmitigated disaster that sold out Chicagoans for too little in return and remains no small cause of Chicago’s current budget woes. Now we see the Big Ten schools potentially falling prey to the same kind of temptation to let in private investment so as to get, and spend, money from the future now.

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti has been arguing that the league’s 18 schools should take an offer of $2.4 billion of privately source

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