Fund them to do what exactly? Come up with their own research ideas?

You got the pipeline backwards. The government picks the research areas/priorities then allocates funding for those, and universities apply and compete to get grants. _Then_, once a grant is given to a school, is funding for labs and graduate students allocated.

If the government has no interest in doing research and provides no funding then schools don’t have projects to work on and no money to hire graduate students.

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loeg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That is how it usually works, but again, MIT has tens of billions of dollars. They could literally write their own grants.

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counters 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund.

It's also worth noting that the structural costs of research are far larger than what any single institution would be able to shoulder. For instance, MIT has extremely limited supercomputing resources under their own maintenance. Researchers would typically use such resources from centralized places funded by the NSF or DOE, where larger pools of money can be assembled.

And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment.

You might as well argue that companies should never take venture capital - e.g. if they can't finance their growth through profits alone then they shouldn't raise any money. The whole point of grants or investment is to subsidize and incentive work which has payoffs on much longer timescales than what market dynamics can sustain alone.

	▲	loeg 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> A sizable chunk of the endowment likely has legal restrictions that limit how funds can be spent. E.g., they could be earmarked for undergraduate scholarships or a specific lab at a specific department. The endowment isn't a slush fund. Some of it has some restrictions, but money is fungible. I do not believe that MIT is actually limited (in practice) from writing their own grants because of donor restrictions (if they wanted to). > And of course this doesn't even get into the reality that the annual operating costs of somewhere like MIT likely far exceeds the investment returns generated by the endowment. Somehow they spend $1.2B/year on administration, so, yeah. Don't do that. But they easily have enough principal to cover grant funding for the remaining years of this administration. Especially if they can play on their lib donor heart-strings about how mean the current administration is being to them.
	▲	spyckie2 21 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think this is a valid point, but if the talent pool shrinkage was truly a threat to your academic institution are you really going to just watch? And the argument is that research funding is coming back but just not to MIT. So I think it is a serious long term issue that they have to consider going forward, and not something that they can just hope goes away.

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snark42 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Much of those billions of dollars are contractually limited in how they can use both the principal and gains so it's really not that simple.

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bongoman42 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Government is not great at picking up or creating ideas. Academia has to lead in that and then show government why it would be best for the nation to fund those. The government is good at long term funding for ideas that may not be the best for private sector right away but it should not be creating ideas themselves otherwise you would get things like Lysenkoism.

	▲	kjkjadksj 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who do you think sits on these grant review boards? It isn’t bureaucrats. These people are scientists in the field too.