Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
Office for Sponsored Programs
1033 Massachusetts Avenue
5th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
617-495-5501
osp@harvard.edu"This work was funded in part by NSF Award CNS-2054869 and gifts from Apple, Capital One, Facebook, Google, and Mozilla."
That said, private grant funding is just of a completely different scale than government grant funding. For example, NIH's annual budget is 48 billion and most of that goes to research (https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/organization/budget).
For instance, the Chan Zuckerberg Institute before Zuck decided he had to appear to hate science in order to curry favor with the current regime.
If you want them to do a specific experiment you’ll likely first need to convince them that it’s a good use of their time.
Harvard itself plays approximately zero role in the decision to do a study or not. (There are ethical oversight committees, etc.)
$1M total cost ($600-800k direct cost depending on terms) will buy you a postdoc’s time and effort for 5 years. Unfortunately most labs aren’t set up for a time/money tradeoff, so 5 postdocs for 1 year would be unlikely absent a really exciting project.
It definitely happens quite a bit!
And those tend to be: things that are perceived by the donor as having high immediate returns, things that are perceived by the public as having high immediate returns and thus are good for buying status, and things that provide a convenient channel for the donor to exercise power via the donation, making it away to enjoy wealth while also getting a tax break for it.
Basic science doesn't tend to fit any of those, which is why science funded by private philanthropy is small compared either to government funding of basic science or total private philanthropy.
Two reasons.
First, private philanthropy is neither sustainable nor sufficient in scope.
Second, because government funded science is free from having to produce immediate results in order to satisfy the whims of a specific patron such that funding is continued.
> It seems like an obvious channel for corruption of science.
Yes, relying on private entities to fund scientific research does seem like an obvious channel for corruption.
I agree with you but there's irony (and a possible lesson about motives) in the current situation.
We also have a strategic interest in draining intelligent individuals from other countries and nationalizing them in ours, which science funding plays a major part in doing.
One of the reasons why its complicated, however, is that the University environment has changed significantly in the US. What used to be academically-motivated institutions dedicated to the pursuit of education are now, essentially, just boring businesses, with more middle managers than educators. As one example, UCLA has a $9.8B endowment. Their athletics programs brought in $120M last year (though, they spent more, and the university itself had to provide gap funding of $30M. yup.) IPAM was receiving $5M/year in NSF funding (DMS-1925919). One obviously extreme way of looking at this: UCLA could have funded Terrance Tao's mathematics research group for six years with the money they used to save a hundred million dollar athletics program that's somehow still losing money.
This is a priorities issue for universities, through and through. But, Universities have slowly evolved their priorities to bloat their managerial class, which has forced them into impossible financial situations where the only way out is to bias investment into revenue generating verticals like maximizing the size of the student body at any cost on the backs of no-default student loans, international students, and athletics programs. Research takes a back seat.
I am all for public funding of science, but even many university researchers would argue, as a part of the system, that its broken (for reasons which extend even beyond those I've brought up). That's why I struggle to take a solid side on this issue; I want science, but what I want more is a University system that actually takes education and research seriously.
With most actions, there's nothing being remedied, just an assertion of control. The action isn't tied to an improvement goal or a remedy with rationale.
As Tao noted, in cases where a remedy for a wrong is mentioned, the remedies being proposed by the administration do far more harm to any ostensible victims than the original asserted wrongs.
Nothing about their actions is in good faith in terms of improving academics in the US, nor do they even try in most cases to pretend to be trying to improve academics at all.
The market can't provide public goods like basic research since it's non-excludable. This is a market failure, causing inefficient allocation of resources.
Therefore, the government has to provide it. This improves efficiency of resource distribution.
An Australian nuclear scientist working for the UK Rutherford (New Zealander) labs | Tube Alloys | MAUD program told them how to.
It took a while to convince the US scientists who were mainly interested in making big hot piles for power.
The actual building of atomic weapons (Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy) took place under a fully authoritarian ultra secret State directed militarily controlled program that cost a significant chunk of national GDP.
The example you chose appears to be both incorrect and the very opposite of whatever point you wanted to make.
My crude take on the underlying root cause is resentment, discontent, and similar feelings. Happiness is reality minus expectations, and a whole lot of folks are unhappy life did not turn out how they thought it would.
https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/researchers_point_t...
Nothing in physics requires us to buy into the political documents; if the average person isn't owed anything under the rules, no one is.
Either we're science driven where only politics makes someone special and we should then moderate that because in reality, they are not special, just a button pusher, just a signature. Or we're a bunch of idiots living in a trailer park.
Seems you subscribe to the whole "everything is a mystery to politics" when it's just biology self-selecting and we should fucking moderate that. With violence if necessary. Because fuck them. They aren't owed anything either, they're just manipulating politics.
"Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds"
In addition many scientists involved (like Oppenheimer) later faced political persecution during the McCarthy era.
American atomic research succeeded despite, or perhaps because of, intense state control and funding
I don't particularly think that the secrecy or control of a single group really reflects on the overall culture however. We wouldn't call phreakers authoritarian just because they weren't publishing their exploits in the newspaper or letting any new person fully into their circle.
Also the prosecution and harassment of communists/leftists and minorities in the US during that era is why I stipulated less oppressive rather than unoppressive.
You can't really enroll graduate students for a 5 year PHD project if their funding can be pulled at a moment's notice like this.
This last election was the end of American democracy.
Zaheer•1h ago
"The Trump administration has suspended the funding of Terence Tao and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA."
abetusk•1h ago
noncoml•1h ago
ojbyrne•46m ago
mindslight•1h ago
intermerda•19m ago
But I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s one of those “enlightened centrists.”
mindslight•5m ago