
Gladwell: Wealthy 'sound like idiots' explaining donations to large universities - adenadel
http://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-billionaires-shouldnt-donate-to-large-universities-2016-8
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apathy
Gladwell is (IMHO) a bit of an ass, but anyone in academia knows that the
richest research universities also make a habit of ripping off the federal
government in the form of research indirects.

Notionally, indirects are overhead for administration and distribution of
grants (typically hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of taxpayer-
provided dollars) but if someone could explain to me why it costs Mass General
90% of the grant's value to hand the money to the researchers that wrote it,
or why Stanford will go broke if it doesn't recover at least another 58% above
and beyond the face value of a $10m P01 grant despite getting oceans of free
$$$ from CIRM, I'd be much obliged.

The research industrial complex isn't exactly on a par with the military
industrial complex, but donors can certainly vote with their wallets against
the most egregious abusers. (For what it's worth, shitty little schools like
USC and UMich can somehow manage to hand off decent sized grants for less than
half the "service charge" of a Stanford or a Harvard... I'd pretend it's
because of the football teams but Stanford doesn't have that excuse either!).

The example of a private donor marching in and rescuing a nearly bankrupt
Glassboro is cool, although I wonder if it will be a permanent solution if the
school doesn't fix whatever got them in that mess. In that respect, Harvard
and Stanford and Princeton are rather safe bets. But safe bets are for wusses
anyways, so fuck that. :-D

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SpikeDad
Read the article before commenting. Seems obvious but it's rare I find in
online communities.

The article is SPECIFICALLY about billionaire donations to wealthy
universities that have no need for the donations. He uses Princeton as an
example of a university that could never spend all of the revenue from their
endowments but continue to get millions of dollars in donations from uber
wealthy donors merely it seems as status symbols or billionaires trying to
impress other billionaires.

