[fooker]

I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the fixed overhead aspect of this.

There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a football coach for ten million and builds a new building every year.

This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the universities are intentionally making this look worse than it is for public sympathy.

[colincooke]

Again please read my post carefully. There is a valid critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in this manner has little added economic benefit in the long run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the short run.

You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.

[fooker]

I disagree.

The kind of reform you are talking about does not work against quasi-government organizations with the GDP of small countries.

It'll be held up in courts for 50 years, and even then it'll be a game of whack a mole.

There's a reason things got so bad.

[johnnyanmac]

Translation: it's too slow and you don't care what breaks in the process. You already got yours.

Anyone complaining about slow courts should probably focus on the courts themselves, or the money coming in. Not the act of laws.

[vkou]

Yes, the rule of law is incredibly inconvenient. Why be bound by it, when you can just do anything that you want?

[rayiner]

There is a very basis here for invoking “rule of law” where:

1) we’re talking about discretionary grants being made out of taxpayer dollars;

2) congress has delegated authority to make the grants and to the executive, including determining indirects; and

3) the executive action is being used to save money.

It’s also “the rule of law” in some sense when NIMBYs sue to keep a Ronald Mcdonald House from being built in their posh neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean we need to lionize it on that basis, or preemptively surrender to efforts to invoke the law to block reform. The universities can afford expensive lawyers with their 59% indirects, let those lawyers worry about it.

[fooker]

Yes, that's why countries are not just run by courts and judges.

[vkou]

If you want to change the law, the legislature is right there. All it needs to do is pass a bill.

If you can't be arsed to change the law, you have to follow it.

This is generally how civilized people are expected to behave, and a 49.8% mandate does not give you license to do away with the rule of law.

[fooker]

There's no law to change here.

Universities have freedom in how to use grant money. The government had so far not bothered with controlling what they do with the money coming from the government. The situation is a bit like you donating to a charity and they spending it on executive bonuses.

Are you proposing that the government has to sign everything into law before taking any action? Can you think of why that might be a terrible idea?

[cudgy]

And yet everyone was arguing recently about how amazing Deepseek was because they operated on such a smaller budget and how the restriction of chips into China forced them to find an efficient solution to training an LLM model. Sudden and drastic changes don’t always result in bad outcomes; in fact, they can many times produce outcomes that were never possible without the shock to the system.

Most of the critics of the doge are arguing that the changes are too fast and that the system needs to gradually and systematically through a series of conferences and meetings come to a proposal that might be implemented sometime in the future.

[robwwilliams]

Spurious. Football coaches are not paid by overhead dollars. but mainly by alumni that like football wins.

No, when a major for-profit company outsources research they pay way more than a 50% “markup”. Unless they go to a research university: then they pay much less, and just like the federal government they are getting a fine deal.

Yes, some rich foundations (Gates, Ellison etc) exploit the situation and do not pay full overhead costs: They are essentially mooching on the research institutions and the federal government.

[cudgy]

So you don’t think that some of the money that gets sent to athletic directors to build fancy stadiums and pay for multimillion dollar coaches would’ve gone possibly to research facilities if those athletic departments didn’t exist?

[robwwilliams]

No, I do not. Most health science centers do not have football teams ;-). I am at UTHSC in Memphis and I can assure you we do not send money to support the Vols in Knoxville. Worlds apart.

[icameron]

Athletic programs are a net profit center at many D1 football schools.

[cudgy]

Really? Then why do they charge students athletic fees? Why do stadiums and athletic centers receive government grants and subsidies?

Here is a huge list of donations from various groups to an athletic endowment at the University of Alabama. Much of this money could have and would have been donated to schools directly for research and academic purposes instead the athletic foundations.

Alabama is one of the most successful Division 1 football programs in the nation. If these programs are so profitable, why do they need so much money for these endowments? And why all the money from governments and grants? Doesn’t add up.

https://crimsontidefoundation.org/ways-to-support/Endowments...

[wredcoll]

> Here is a huge list of donations from various groups to an athletic endowment at the University of Alabama. Much of this money could have and would have been donated to schools directly for research and academic purposes instead the athletic foundations.

Uh, what? Why would that happen, exactly?

[cudgy]

Uh … basic deduction and simple set theory.

Because donations are made for tax purposes and virtue signaling … someone is going to get this money. Many of the donors are alumni and will donate money to the school. It was already targeted to the university athletic departments. It’s not a big stretch for it to be donated to another university department that has a direct academic role.

[ls612]

The places paying their football coaches big bucks have football programs that are net revenue generating.

[fnordpiglet]

Doesn’t the football stuff fund itself through tickets, licensing, etc? It seems hard to believe research overhead grants are going to the football coach.

[o11c]

I've heard that said. But my university tuition had an explicit 10% charge to subsidize upgrades for the football program, so ...

It's very easy to lie in budgets by only counting a subset of expenses.

[fooker]

Money is fungible.

[costigan]

Only if the organization with the money wants to do that. Flip it around. Do you think the sports program at any major university pays for physics research facilities (or any topic outside of sports medicine)?

[fooker]

>Only if the organization with the money wants to do that.

Great, this should be a enough of an argument then for the federal government to decide how grant money is used.

[costigan]

It does. That's what the negotiation on overhead rates is for.

[ModernMech]

A lot of this discussion is people who don’t understand the system reinventing it from first principles as they slowly come to terms with the nuance.

[fnordpiglet]

Not when double entry accounting is involved.

[bilbo0s]

And?

The one thing has nothing to do with the other.

Football funds itself. That's why the coach makes so much money. If research funded itself, researchers would make a lot of money.

[HDThoreaun]

Football program spends big because it rakes in huge amounts. In order to keep making all that money though they need a good team which costs money.