Let’s say you have something around $10^8 you want to spend on nontraditional basic research (nontraditional because you understand there’s too much funding for run-of-the-mill science already).
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And you aren’t going to be hiring individual scientists because you don't have the expertise and also you want to spend your time sailing or whatever. Instead you want to create an institution that will do that work for you, that you control but don't have to manage.
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The anti-model and default option here is a "center of excellence." You pick an attractive-sounding, socially approved field and put up a building and fill it with the most credentialed people you can lure away from academic departments in that field.
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You free those people from their university admin responsibilities, which is a plus. But they will mostly do slightly more of whatever they'd be doing in academia. They're stars, so they wouldn't be struggling for grants anyway.
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And you probably end up with club full of like-minded cronies who are all pursuing the same approach to the same general topic. They don't have the necessary friction of people telling them they're doing everything wrong and their emperor is a naked baby.
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And worse you may well end up with a like-minded club pursuing a smoke-and-mirrors field that couldn't make it in academia at all and that exists only because your institution is so well-funded it can spew out hundreds of cut-and-paste nonsense papers every year.
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(Presumably you can guess some of the ones I have in mind!) This is especially a risk if the funder got sold on the bogus field by smoke-and-mirrors in the first place, and then is ego-invested in keeping it going in the face of doubters.
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So you have a principal-agent problem. You need institutional management that is somehow accountable to you to spend your money well. However, you know you don't have the expertise to assess that, at least not on a timescale less than 5-10 years.
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The management has two functions: straight-up operations (make sure your building's chalkboards are supplied with chalk and the employee health plan is sound), and research management per se, which includes line management of scientists (if you do that) and hiring or grant-making
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This is the best paper I've read on research management. Come to think of it, it's about the only paper I've read on that, but it seems very good: http://worrydream.com/refs/Kennedy%20-%20Administration%20of%20Research%20in%20a%20Research%20Corporation.html …pic.twitter.com/Hq3uCK4NRB
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This is an inherently meta-rational function, meaning that it's about understanding and acting upon rational (scientific) work from above and outside it.
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Meta-rational also meaning that it inherently can't be done rationally. For example, it cannot be done by metrics of any sort (although it might take metrics, probably peculiar and continually adjusted ones, into account). It's inherently a matter of judgement, not justification.
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This means that decisions about what research to fund must NOT be accountable to anyone other than, in the long run, the funder(s), and must NOT be justified in any specific way. That would be merely-rational and leads to the bureaucracy-heavy mediocrity we have now.
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