>haven't built universities like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc.
I assume the answer is that they generally find that it makes a lot more sense to give oodles of cash to their alma mater or some favored school to get your name on a building and/or really beef up a department than to try to found a new school which would likely take decades to establish any sort of reputation.
You're underestimating the egos of billionaires and how they love winning compared to other billionaires. A name on a building is nice. A name on a university that's mentioned with Duke and MIT...now that's something you can brag about. The owners of NBA teams - all billionaires, most willing to lose money year-to-year in order to win and beat the other billionaires. The women's basketball league in Russia - teams owned by oligarchs who all lose money on the league but spend lavishly to beat each other.
>A name on a university that's mentioned with Duke and MIT...now that's something you can brag about.
That's the rub though, isn't it. I'm not sure even Bezos has money that would be needed to pull that off over, say, a 10 year horizon. MIT has almost a $20 billion endowment to give some idea of the sorts of money flows we're talking about here. To say nothing of the fact that they already have the faculty, physical plant, reputation, etc.
That’s why I think they should donate (ie buy) an existing university and transform it. I’d go for Pepperdine, right in Malibu, near the beach, perfect weather, great architecture.
But I actually agree. Why try to build a university from scratch even starting with an existing "tier 2" (whatever that means) school when you can get your name attached to a significant new initiative at an institution which already has a lot of prestige?
I'm not sure that's literally true. Given sufficient money:
- Desired faculty: We'll triple your salary and hire your spouse too. Oh, and give you unprecedented freedom.
- Desired students: Free tuition and board and a great campus environment.
At the least you could jump-start a pretty darned interesting educational institution at least within a certain focus. But I'm not sure the money is realistic, at least at a scaled undergraduate level.
I'm surprised Olin college hasn't come up in this discussion yet (http://www.olin.edu/). They're small, but essentially went with this model, at least for a while. They're more undergraduate-focused though, so I don't know if they'll ever garner the "reputation" of MIT and Stanford's impactful research programs.
Look at this way - if you're going to send your son/daughter to a university and you're trying to decide between MIT and Bezos University (all things else considered equal). Which one is more risky? It's a no brainer. Not to mention many of these tech "gods" notoriously scrap projects when they don't work out in a short term timeframe. There's just very little reason not to send your child to a prestigious university if you have the means.
I'm sure there is no shortage of universities which would rename themselves to Bezos U for enough money. It's not even a particularly radical notion. I don't know any examples of entire universities but Cornell's Business School renamed itself after a very large donation and MIT's new computing school is named after a very large donor.
>haven't built universities like Stanford, Duke, Cornell etc.
I assume the answer is that they generally find that it makes a lot more sense to give oodles of cash to their alma mater or some favored school to get your name on a building and/or really beef up a department than to try to found a new school which would likely take decades to establish any sort of reputation.