| A couple things: 1) You can actively just donate money to a professor's lab. You cannot usual direct what they do with it, because that's a grant (or contract), but if you just think Professor X does amazing work, you can give them money. 2) There are tons of existing non-profits that do this. My department, for example, was founded thanks to the generous donations of two non-profits. 3) A key that HN always forgets (or doesn't know about) with overhead is that if a funder pre-specifies that they'll only pay X for overhead, the university will almost always accept that. Now it hurts a lot when it's 0%, and I actually object when people do that because overhead pays for things needed in research, and at my university that's essentially saying "I'm donating this, but the taxpayers of $State will pick up the rest", but we regularly accept grants for very low levels of indirects. You just have to state it in advance. 4) You could also endow a chair if you wanted to make sure that University X always has someone working on Y supported with your money, if you've got enough. |