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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

What's wrong with paying for academic buildings to be built (and having your name on it)? The point is that students can go to the building and receive lectures, or run labs, or read books in the library. Who cares whose name is on the building... These buildings will stand for a long time anyway, soon nobody will know who that person was anyway (other than by the name of the building).

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For me what’s wrong is that ”buildingless students” in rich universities is not a social problem at all, so funding those has no positive impact in the society.

One would think that such buildings would be built even without rich donors.

There's nothing wrong with it per se, it's just in my view the money could be better spent. If a university needs a new building it will get built regardless. In contrast, I know graduate students living off ramen and suffering because their stipends are so small. Here the work of Simons Foundation on funding grad students is of great help because it means the students don't have to focus on getting money on top of their research but just focus on their research, which should lead to better results.

For some reason he didn’t want to fund William Stein and his rival to Mathematica.

Today's plutocrats should be looking to people like Carnegie for inspiration.

He didn't pay to put his name on one or two libraries in influential universities, he paid to set up a national system of libraries which any person could walk into and make use of.

Why haven't any of our tycoons stepped up to create a national system of community centers, makerspaces, etc? I'll give you three guesses.

They decided fighting malaria and polio had higher priority?

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