[mathattack]

What surprises me isn't that Universities need money, it's how cheap they're willing to sell themselves. $20 million allows one guy to push around a university with an endowment and budget both more than 50x that. [1]

Generally naming rights involve doubling the endowment of a school. And of course you get some added influence, but $20 million in Oklahoma seems like it wouldn't even pay for 5 years of the football coach's [2] (coach's, not coaches!) salary.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universiti...

[1] http://www.ou.edu/publicaffairs/oufacts.html

[2] http://www.coacheshotseat.com/SalariesContracts.htm

[ceejayoz]

> What surprises me isn't that Universities need money, it's how cheap they're willing to sell themselves. $20 million allows one guy to push around a university with an endowment and budget both more than 50x that.

That's not cheap when you compare it to politics. $5-10M a year for Lockheed Martin helps it win trillion dollar projects like the F-35. https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00000010...

[greenpresident]

Here is a description of the phenomenon, recently linked on daringfireball:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox

[mathattack]

Interesting. I've also viewed it that the folks paying the economic rents are not coordinated enough to fight back.

[juliangregorian]

I was surprised when I found out about the Countrywide Loans guy[0], he was buying congresspeople for low 5 figures!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countrywide_financial_political...

[mathattack]

No wonder they say that lobbying is more efficient than R&D!