> 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.
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.