How much does a flakey professor cost?

June 18, 2010 9:07 AM

For a short story. Say a multi billionaire with an extreme science hobby horse (transhumanism, cryonics, cold fusion, etc.) wants to endow a professor of his favorite (border) subject at a mainline research uni like MIT or Stanford; how much money does he pay the university?

Has anything close to this already happened in real life?

posted by bukvich to Education (12 answers total)

Endowing a professorship at a university typically costs $1 - $3 million. For something kind of fringe you'd probably also need to fund the research program, since getting grants would be difficult. Figure $5 - $10 million for the professorship plus a more-or-less self-perpetuating grant, depending on the cost of the research.

Examples of professorship costs: U Michigan Engineering, UC Santa Barbara, Penn State, UNC [pdf]
posted by jedicus at 9:13 AM on June 18, 2010

Also, it's not entirely unheard of for the institution to decline the grant if it is truly inconsistent with the school's image. Cold fusion, maybe. Eugenics? Not going to happen at Harvard, no matter how much money you throw at it.

Sadly, this is also the case for my proposed "Admiral Haddock Studies" concentration at Oxford, though to date I have offered only $30. They may change their minds as the F/X rate further hammers the pound, though.
posted by Admiral Haddock at 9:18 AM on June 18, 2010

Your imaginary multi-billionaire would be much more likely to fund his own institute, hiring professors away from universities.

One popular image of crazy rich guys with dreams would be J. Craig Venter and Nathan Myrvold.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:22 AM on June 18, 2010

(transhumanism, cryonics, cold fusion, etc.)

Other people have already posted what it costs to keep an academic at a university perpetually. If you actually want them to do experiments, well, scientists can pretty much spend as much money as you can give them. On the fusion front, ITER is expected to cost €5 to €10 billion.
posted by Mike1024 at 9:30 AM on June 18, 2010

If your billionaire really wants to do cool research, they set up their own institute, none of thei penny-ante chair stuff. Seriously, the Perimeter Institute, set up by one of the founders of RIM is such a beast. With $100M (Canadian!) seed funding, leveraged with government funds, he managed to hire Nobel laureates and several very respected physicists. That's the way to go if you're a crazy billionaire with money to burn (or even a sucessful businessman with an interest in basic science).
posted by bonehead at 9:46 AM on June 18, 2010

Cold fusion is making a bit of a comeback but it's been renamed to low energy nuclear reaction (LENR) partly to avoid a lot of the cynicism. There is actual good science being done on the subject with a growing gathering.
posted by Quack at 10:04 AM on June 18, 2010

The above commenters who note that he'd be more likely to just set up his own institute are on point, but if you want to keep it in the university setting, he'd be more likely to endow an entire department or inter-departmental program than a single chair. One guy isn't going to get all that much done, but five tenured professors, a dozen associates, and fifty grad students? That's a little scientific community right there.

The inter-departmental program is actually not a terrible idea, since most of the mad scientist ideas which could plausibly attract this sort of funding are cross-disciplinary anyways, implicating at least one of biology, chemistry, and physics plus a good dose of engineering.

This could also get him outside some of the departmental politics, as these sorts of programs can be their own sorts of animals which participate in their originating departments but aren't necessarily controlled by them.
posted by valkyryn at 10:05 AM on June 18, 2010

Best answer: The classic example of hobby-horse, fringe, wealthy donor-supported research is PEAR, which operated out of Princeton until it was closed down a few years ago. This lab benefited from having a tenured professor, Robert Jahn, already willing to do the research and relatively low operating costs, but according to James Randi, over the 28 years of its operation it raised about $10 million in funds. As I understand it, Princeton was required to supply space and some cost support as a result of Jahn's pre-batshit tenureship in the engineering school, but kept its involvement to the minimum required and preferred not to talk about it as much as possible; probably they also wanted to avoid alienating donors who gave to Princeton in other capacities.

So, if you have an enabler in place already, costs can be directed straight to the lab in question without involving the school much at all- probably for less than a million dollars a year, depending on how much equipment, personnel, and materials you want to supply.
posted by monocyte at 10:06 AM on June 18, 2010 [3 favorites]

For a short story example of a millionaire with an extreme science interest and how he funded it, you might want to read Heinlein's "The Man who Sold the Moon."

And I get the impression that something like that is what's behind SpaceX.

One of the Johnson & Johnson heirs funds "Thoughtful House," if I understand correctly.

Bill & Melinda Gates seem very emphatic about their malaria funding, among other things.
posted by galadriel at 10:07 AM on June 18, 2010

Recently, $100 million was the price to get the donor's name on the University of Michigan's business school. As an example of a school turning down a donation somewhat similar to the one you're talking about, in the 90s, Yale turned down $20 million meant to fund an intensive course on Western Civilization.
posted by Xalf at 10:44 AM on June 18, 2010

The funny thing is that a multi billionaire would not have to put up very much money. Especially on a borderline subject it would be likely a donor could put up $500,000 to $1 million initially. The harder thing to do would be to convince a university of the usefulness of the project from a donor pool perspective. From the pool perspective, the university will need to justify its 'support of recognition' of the endowment based on the projected income it can raise from other interested donors and foundations. In the Yale case mentioned above, it came down to curricular demands of the donor. In the case of the fictional donor in your case, the support would be worded "endowment for research into causes related to X" and that would be it. Additional funding may be 'endowment for symposia related to X' and 'scholarship related to outstanding graduate research of X'.

I know in the late 1990s there was a study endowed - I think at Baylor University - that looked to research whether transfiguration was real. I don't know the state of the project but it was mentioned in Discover magazine in 2007.
posted by parmanparman at 11:29 AM on June 18, 2010

Best answer: A bank bought an Ayn Rand chair in Philosophy at the University of Texas for $2 million in 2008. Does that count?
posted by soviet sleepover at 12:57 PM on June 18, 2010 [1 favorite]