A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
I'd be ok with anonymous donations if they were truly anonymous both publicly and to the management of the institution receiving the money.
Maybe this is something that the government could facilitate - pool these resources, then help distribute them where they are needed. Almost like how taxes work.
Maintains uncomfortable eye contact with the camera
If anyone is aware of the source, it's not anonymous, it's undisclosed.
Agreed, literal anonymous, way cool. Undisclosed, much less so.
The tweet speaks of "dark money". I like that term better. It feels worse
I work for a nonprofit and “anonymous donor” definitely means “c-suite folks know who it came from”
This exactly. If you really want to stay anonymous then use a middleman and do it anonymous to the recipient as well.
Everyone involved with the institution, students, parents who pay tuition, teachers, authorities who financially support the institution (...) have a right to know in whose pocket they are.
It's not a donation if they get to dictate what the organization does - it's a bribe.
There was a librarian who saved his whole life and when he passed donated I think 1 million dollars to his old university. That university then spent the money on a new score board for the football field. I bet if he saw that he would have wished he put some stipulations on his donation.
I have a similar line of thinking. I'm a musician, so if I was filthy rich I might want to donate money to a school's music department. If the school is one fiscal entity, I would have to put that as a stipulation to ensure they gave the money to that department, not divert it to something overfunded or just padding the board's pocket as bonuses for "a job well done"
Literally every donation to any organization anywhere comes with strings attached. Nobody just gives money blindly and says "Here, somebody else use this."
You drop money in the collection plate, it's because you want your faith to be shared and your church to prosper. You drop your change in the box at the convenience store, it's because you don't want to be walking around with three pounds of garbage money jingling in your pockets like Santa's nutsack. There's always a motive for giving.
I donate regularly to a charity and don’t try to dictate how they spend that money, because I have faith that they’ll responsibly use my donations.
Sure, but not just generally "charity." You pick and choose who you donste to, and you donate to charitable organizations that you think do good work. If they started smelting orphans, you'd probably stop writing checks.
smelting orphans
Haven't heard that one before. Had a hearty chuckle.
I gave someone from high-school I hadn't spoken too in 15 years 2 grand so she didn't get evicted from her apartment and end up homeless. Never told her. Sometimes people just do nice things bcz it's the right thing to do.
Nobody should be homeless over hospital bills.
Removing these biases is the whole point of public funding for things. Everyone shares the same resources and people who have more wealth give more. The fact that major institutions that perform public functions rely on private donations is the problem.
So someone donates money to their city's library with the specific purpose that they can expand their building to have more space that's a bribe?
Maybe that person hates books and likes seeing them locked away in book prison?
The question is; does this give the anonymous donor that ability? Being anonymous implies not.
I'm fairly certain it is only anonymous "on paper". Behind closed doors, they know where it came from and what is expected in return.
Simpsons did it!
"Well, frankly, test scores like Larry's would call for a very generous contribution. For example, a score of 400 would require a donation of new football uniforms, 300, a new dormitory, and in Larry's case, we would need an international airport."
Important additional context that didn’t make it into this tweet, this donation was explicitly directed toward promoting “free inquiry and expression” at UChicago. Decades ago that was a legit strength of UChicago that really was pretty ideologically neutral, and that history gives them a phenomenal tool for spinning dog whistles and ultra conservative policies as part of “the life of the mind.”
Here’s the announcement email from the University’s president yesterday.
Worth noting that Eman Abdelhadi is faculty at UChicago, speaking out against her own employer alongside hundreds of other faculty. Eman is particularly adept at making sure every time they use “free inquiry and expression” as a conservative dog whistle it gets thrown back in their faces. (She’s also just kind of a badass.)
UChicago admin work very hard to promote this image of the school as a bastion for “sane conservatives” by taking stances diametrically opposed to the what the students and faculty actually stand behind. The real UChicago is anti-genocide, pro-union, and knows that promoting free speech doesn’t mean tolerating hate speech.
I only have two words "Chicago Boys". This shit has been going on there for a long time.
Oh 100% absolutely. I mean the gentrification of Hyde Park and Woodlawn with active, deliberate harm to the black community started at the University’s inception in 1898 (1895? 92? They keep changing the “established in” date on all their merch and propaganda, it’s hard to keep up) and continues to this day with no signs of slowing.
I also should have specified that if we’re talking about student/faculty attitudes the “real” UChicago community does not or at least should include Booth and the psychopathic econ department. That’s where all the money comes from (because it’s evil) but everyone except admin hates them. Also I’m pretty sure they would argue “community” means communism and community of any kind should be abolished in favor of a social free market or some shit, whatever garbage they are peddling these days.
Um, if it's anonymous can they influence anything?
Anonymous usually means that they don't want their name to show up publicly.
There's almost certainly knowledge of who that money is coming from at least with a couple of persons that received the funds.
More like they don't want the wider public to know it was them that donated. Some folks that are extremely wealthy go to great lengths to keep their names out of people's minds and stay out of the public eye as a matter of personal security.
The university knows who’s paying its bills and has agreed to keep it a secret.
A truly anonymous donation should be double-blind to the donor AND recipient. If you don’t want credit, don’t expect influence either.
I don't know what you mean by
double-blind to the donor AND recipient
But to me that phrase kinda implies that the donor doesn't know who they donated to. Which…no. It should be blind to the recipient. Entirely blind. But people donating can still choose where to donate to.
The recipient doesn’t know the donor, and the donor has no way to prove their identity to the recipient.
It sounds like the donor had requirements. From The Tribune:
The University of Chicago has received a $100 million gift from an anonymous donor to support free expression, marking what may be the largest-ever single donation to support such values in higher education, the university announced Thursday.
And:
Discussions surrounding the donation have been ongoing for over a year, according to a university spokesperson.
The gift was ridiculed by advocates involved in the encampment that highlighted abuses against Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War and torn down by the university in the spring.
“It’s truly a slap in the face,” said Yousseff Hasweh, a U of C grad who’s diploma was withheld by the university for two months, allegedly for his involvement in the protest.
University of Chicago is the home of the federalist society.
And the home of the Chicago school of economics. It's a little like worrying Fox News is gonna change it's editorial bias because of a donation. That ship has sailed
Not publicly supported enough though lol. *leers at 40k of student debt
Do you think the donation will somehow make the University of Chicago more conservative?
Just hold out the finger in the air for when there is a change in the intensity of propaganda