If people are worried about scientific donors having undue influence, a much cleaner route than trying to stop donations or screen every person is to simply require that donations be anonymous. That way, everyone still has the freedom to sponsor whatever they want, but nobody gets bribed to overlook sex trafficking.
I don't think that works in practice. If you donate money with the goal of advancing some agenda, and it's officially anonymous, you'll find a way of letting the right people know it was you.
> That way, everyone still has the freedom to sponsor whatever they want
That still has a distortion effect on the institution and scientific community. And that's assuming the world's top scientists could never possibly guess that the only rich dude who always talks about X is making large anonymous donations to support research on X...
The correct way to do this is to fund a non-profit that then hires a set of third party reviewers to award grants on a competitive basis around one or more themes. This is how Elon Musk and Bill Gates do things, for example.
But no matter how you package it, anyone with a real reputation has more to gain than to lose by taking money from a pedophile. Harvard's/MIT's admins were trying to protect their faculty's reputation.
