Why Donate to a University?
The Need for Ineffective Altruism Research
Effective Altruists like to talk about what is the best available charity that you can donate to. Some top candidates include GiveWell (which rates charities for effectiveness; if you give to them, they will re-gift it to a few of their top charities), Animal Charity Evaluators (similar to GiveWell, but for nonhuman animal charities), and these Effective Altruism Funds: https://app.effectivealtruism.org/funds .
And sure, that's interesting and practically useful and all. But why are all these researchers assuming that philanthropists want effective charities, that do more good for your dollar? What about all the givers who don't care about doing good, but they still want to give away money? You know, like the vast majority of givers. Where is all the research on the worst charitable causes to donate to?
Now, I'm sure you can find many hilariously bad "charitable causes" to donate to -- such as ISIS, or some group doing research into more effective biological weapons. But most givers don't really want that either. We're not effective destruction advocates. We're against the "effective" part in effective altruism, not the "altruism" part. We want to waste our money, not do the most bad for our dollar. What's the best way to waste your money?
Giving to your Local Academic Department
I'd like to humbly suggest that an excellent way to waste money is to give it to your university. As a philosopher, I can assure you that your local philosophy department will be happy to completely waste as much money as you want. Any academic department will do likewise, but I'm mostly familiar with philosophy departments.
A few years ago, the famous investor Bill Miller donated $75 million to the Johns Hopkins philosophy department (https://www.chronicle.com/article/johns-hopkins-just-got-the-largest-donation-ever-given-to-a-philosophy-department/). At the time, I wrote up a post about what a colossal waste of money this was. Academics predictably went apoplectic and started insulting me (thus strengthening my case).
Since then, I don't know what Hopkins has done with the money. (They're probably still struggling to find ways to spend it, but I'm sure they'll think of something.) So this isn't about them in particular. But let me tell you what will generally happen if you give a lot of money to your local philosophy department. (Some of this is copied from that earlier post.) They'll probably use it for one or more of the following:
(a) More Professors!
They may use the money to hire more philosophers. This does not mean that some new, brilliant philosophers will be created. Rather, it will most likely simply move some already successful and well-paid philosophers from other schools to your university. These philosophers will do pretty much the same stuff they were already doing, but with more money. They'll then be able to get fancier houses and go on more vacations.
Of course, the schools these professors leave will then try to hire replacements, etc. On net, there will be room for a few more people in the profession. This means, roughly, that a few marginal philosophers will stay in the profession who otherwise would have left. Note: “marginal” is here used in the economic sense. That is, a few people who would have just barely not made it in philosophy will instead just barely make it. Of course, there is a lot of unpredictability, but something like that is the expected impact of a change of this sort.
Society can then look forward to a slightly increased production of "philosophy", that is, more articles and/or books in philosophy, added to the tens of thousands of such articles that are already being produced every year, and already going almost completely unnoticed because we have thousands of times more of them than any human being could read.
Note again, the expected net effect is to increase production by the marginal philosophers, not the top philosophers – i.e., some people who would have just barely failed to get a research job will now just barely get one. The top researchers would have continued doing research either way.
Is this marginal increase in the quantity of philosophy a social benefit? No, it isn’t. It obviously isn’t, for two reasons:
(i) We already have way more philosophy than we know what to do with; if anyone pays attention to these additional marginal philosophy articles, that attention will have to come at the expense of other philosophy articles.
(ii) Most philosophy that people write is false. We know that, since published philosophy papers on the same question usually contradict each other. We should expect the added, marginal philosophy articles to be even more likely to be false, and less likely to be interesting, than the average existing philosophy article. So probably, the main effect of these added articles will be to take attention away from better articles.
(b) Graduate Students
Maybe your local philosophy department will use the money to give better support to graduate students. Then some graduate students will have better accommodations, or less financial strain, during graduate school. Perhaps this will occasionally make the difference to whether they stay in philosophy or leave. If so, this might be a benefit to the ones who stay . . . or it might very well be a cost, since philosophy is not that great of a career for most people (again, esp. the ‘marginal’ people).
Again, the net effect might be to add a few marginal philosophers to the profession.
(c) More Talks!
Another thing that academics like to do with extra money is invite visiting speakers. So they'll fly other academics over to your local university, have them read some in-progress paper for an hour, followed by questions, then buy them dinner and put them up in a hotel. If we have more money, we might organize a whole conference.
What does this accomplish? Well, we get to hear the visitor's paper. However, we could just as well have gotten the paper by email and read it at home. We could also have corresponded with the author about it if we had questions. But in truth, we probably would not have done that, because, again, there are already thousands of times more articles out there than we could possibly read. Most likely, if not for the visiting speaker, we would have preferred to spend our time reading something else -- something closer to our individual interests, something more interesting, etc.
The true value of having a visiting speaker is social. We get to meet the person face to face. This is often someone well-known in the profession, and perhaps someone who knows a few department members personally, so we enjoy meeting them. Then we get to have a nice dinner, paid for by the university. Also, the speaker gets to have a nice little trip to your town (and get away from the kids for a few days). So, that's the real benefit of endowing a lecture series.
No doubt this sounds like an inestimable benefit, well worth funding. You might be worried that this is a little too useful. But don't worry, because at least at my university (and probably many others that have lecture series), there are actually already many more talks every year than anyone would want to go to. So we don't go to all of them as it is. If a new lecture is added during the year, some people will go to that one, and, on average, go to one fewer of the other talks.
In fact, most of us would go to fewer talks than we presently are, if not for a vague feeling of obligation to produce a "good turnout" for the speaker. So the net effect of adding another speaker is usually close to zero, and perhaps a small negative.
(d) More Awards!
Here's another thing we like to do if we get some extra money: create a new award. E.g., we might create a new contest for the best student paper on SJW ideology each year. (We wouldn't call it "SJW ideology" though.) Then maybe we'll offer a $500 cash prize for the winner.
Here is what happens with these contests. A lot of people enter it. Many of these people write a paper specially for the contest. They spend several hours on it. These are generally not very fun hours; they wouldn't be writing this if not for the contest. They're writing it because they want the prize. They might also expend a few other people's time, e.g., getting their friends to comment on the paper. The friends would also prefer not to be doing that, but they'll do it out of a sense of obligation.
Then more hours have to be expended by the prize committee. Each of those papers will have to be read by some professor, and many of them will be read by two or more professors. Those professors will also be suffering during this process -- partly because most of the papers will be terrible, and partly because it'll just be a lot more reading than they wanted to do all at once.
Then one person will win. For that person, the work will have been worth it for the $500 prize. That's the only person who will be benefited. All the other people in the story -- the other contestants, their friends, and the prize committee -- just suffered and expended their time for nothing. The time expended is worth many times more than the prize itself.
After winning the prize, the paper will probably be thrown away. Or it might get published somewhere, adding, once again, to the mountain of philosophy papers that no one has time to read.
Effective Causes
Now, contrast all that with the causes advocated by effective altruists. According to GiveWell's estimates, you can, on average, save a life for around $3000. That's much less effective than most people think (people are under the impression that it's a lot cheaper to save lives, which is why so few people try to do it -- they don't want to be effective), but it's still much more effective than giving to a university. Who wants to save lives, when you could instead use $3000 to fund 3 visiting speakers, or have a few essay contests, or slightly increase three professors' research budgets?
Conclusion: If you want to get rid of some money without doing any significant good, don't give it to real charities. Give it all to your local university.