Plutocrat donors are shaping the agenda at elite universities
ft.com
ft.com
As a former subscriber, this article is about the quality you can expect since the death or retirement of a number of their great writers. Gillian Tett keeps the whole thing afloat as the rest of their staff writers haven't written anything brave or challenging in almost a decade.
I don't mind that donors are putting riders on their "gifts," because funding a chair in something niche is how the system always worked. It is also a bulwark against populism from both sides and against political expediency and revolutionary zeal. The university system used to be for an elite so tiny it didn't matter, where now it's the gatekeeper institution to the middle class, almost like the way mandatory military service for citizenship was, but for a managerial society. Imposing fashionable ideas on the whole system as a means to undermine any foundation for opposition to them is cynical and dishonest.
First of all, does anyone actually believe that we won't have a planet in a decade? That type of hyperbole doesn't seem at place in an FT article.
Secondly, who's to say that the £150m donated to Oxford university won't help climate change? We need scientists, administrators and many other roles to accomplish anything. Oxford seems like a pretty decent place for such people to get their education.
I work at Oxford, but I'm really quite unsure that this is the most effective use of £150m. Suffice to day that my own charitable contributions aren't to my employer...
It could be pathological greed of getting more than they have ability or desire to spend - particularly if it is their job to gain more.
It would make sense for connections to be worth more than mere money per say and the donations are proxies/symbolic.
That is putting aside suspicion agendas against universities that have existed since students protested the war.
Sorry.
I've been in the rationalist community for quite a while, this is the first time I've noticed you here on HN. It is really funny to observe how much people want to argue against you when you condense your point down into a terse statement. Looking through your past comments, it is a very common pattern of behavior.
syn0byte- the man you are replying to is fairly well-connected. I would take the words he said as a credible anecdote- he hangs out with plutocrats enough to know what he said.
Wall Street is full of these people.
This is "Community Shopper" level journalism (except for the opening line, "When I was at Harvard...")
And for non-subscribers, this may help: open up a new Google search and type the title of the article. Then, click on the search result title that comes up and hopefully, you should be able to access it.
https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/koch-foundation...
> In 2007, when the Charles Koch Foundation considered giving millions of dollars to Florida State University’s economics department, the offer came with strings attached.
> First, the curriculum it funded must align with the libertarian, deregulatory economic philosophy of Charles Koch, the billionaire industrialist and Republican political bankroller.
> Second, the Charles Koch Foundation would at least partially control which faculty members Florida State University hired.
> And third, Bruce Benson, a prominent libertarian economic theorist and Florida State University economics department chairman, must stay on another three years as department chairman — even though he told his wife he’d step down in 2009 after one three-year term.