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Comment by newaccount2021 | Hacker News Reader

newaccount2021

The cost to rebuild from scratch would be trivial for the combined endowments of America's top universities, who are surely the primary users

Harvard alone has tens of billions in its endowment.

...and yet, comments here are talking about crowdfunding??

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This comment reveals a misunderstanding about how university research works. Individual professors are responsible for raising money from the government or private philanthropists to pay for research. University endowments are sometimes used for seed investments, but the vast majority of endowment investment into "research" is paying the professor salaries. Note that in most fields the grant-funded graduate students, postdocs, or research scientists are the ones who do the work. In this respect, one could compare university professors to startup-founders, with the return on the universities (meager) investment being indirect returns (the 50% administrative fee that is charged on grants) and fame to the university.

The general point of endowments is to support the university perpetually off the interest and not to spend it directly. For example, Stanford's $30 billion endowment returns $1.3billion per year but that only covers 21% of the universities operating costs.

Crowdfunding comes up whenever those with resources are indifferent to those with need.

People probably just don’t default think of universities. But yes universities have a history of funding stuff exactly like this. And it absolutely fits into their operant model.

Maybe the way for us normies to push for this is to donate to our alma maters and write letters/emails to alumni associations and administrations to propose joint funding of this across multiple schools.

> the way for us normies to push for this is to donate to our alma maters

Unless you put explicit conditions on your donation, chances are you're just going to fund the next round of salary increases for university administrators.

Even with explicit conditions, they often just shuffle other money around under the table.

"This $100 must be spent on science" => "route $100 of the general fund away from science"

Not really the point. Point is this could be funded by universities and that’s probably the only way for average any bodies to submit a (good/bad) idea to them directly.

The snark is overly done on the internet. To the point of dismissal.

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