And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.
Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ?
I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.
Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?
Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?
Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.
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.
> I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.
You absolutely can. These are called “gifts”. Typically, the overhead rate is very low (~10%?) and they are tax deductible as a charitable contribution.
That said, you don’t then get to say “do this research” directly. (That’s called a “directed research” grant and comes with a higher overhead.) But you would basically only give money to a lab that’s already doing research you find interesting — and of course you can talk to them about the research you’d want them to do, this distinction just refers to whether there’s a contract for specific research activities or not.
Setting up a non-profit is not that difficult[1], especially if you're doing educational work vs say politics or NGO type work. You start with a "regular" LLC company, and then ask the IRS to certify it as a non-profit. An attorney that has done this before can probably set it up for $10 - $15K, less if they give you the friends and family rate. You could make it an S-corp which is a bit more complicated and might cost more, and for this purpose would be overkill.
Generating a grant is harder. I went through that process when I was working with IBM to fund some research at CU Boulder on machine learning work that was aligned with IBM's Watson research at the time. As the comment lower down in this thread indicates the University sets its own rules and takes its own share of any monies "donated" for research. The person you want to talk to is the University President and then probably the Provost. The President can point you to the right person and see that they are willing to take a meeting with you about your proposed grant. My experience is that professors will be very enthusiastic the University somewhat more reserved. My experience with CU Boulder was that the politics were pretty intense/petty[2]
My take was that the net amounts end up needing like 3x that is base grant to get what you want to give the professor something. Numbers that are still in the noise for very high net worth individuals but a barrier for less endowed individuals. The good news is that your non-profit can run fundraisers and bring in donations that you then funnel to research. This was something suggested to me as a way some people want to fund something but want to put a bit of space publicly between them and the funding. The non-profit has to report who donated (over say $5000) and how they spent their money, but it doesn't have to "connect the dots" directly so to speak.
[1] I happen to be the Treasurer of one which gave me an opportunity to see how they work in California and what's involved in doing the taxes :-)
[2] Silly example, the Department Chair was blocking any grant for an Associate Professor in the department unless it included a separate grant for a different professor in the department.
