Millionaire alumnus Rory Brooks says it wasn’t his idea to attach his name to the donation he made to Manchester University in the United Kingdom.
Set up in late 2005, the Brooks World Poverty Institute is undertaking research on the back of a three-year, £1,3-million donation from Brooks, more than matched by £2-million from the university.
Over at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, director Janet Hemingway has the happy task of spending £40-million of research grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to control insects and parasites that transmit some of the world’s worst tropical diseases.
In January the European Commission set up an expert group to help universities increase their funding from philanthropic sources — foundations, trusts, charities, corporate and individual donors and alumni.
Philanthropy contributes 16% to UK university research funding. Amid the headlong rush to increase this figure, questions about the power of donors to set the research agenda are being raised.
Less obvious issues include reporting back to donors, intellectual property rights and living with buildings marked with philanthropists’ names.
Diana Leat, director of creative philanthropy at Carnegie UK Trust, points out that foundations are not publicly accountable. “If Gates wakes up tomorrow and says, ‘I am bored with HIV/Aids research now’, there is nothing to stop him pulling his entire budget out of it, which would have a catastrophic consequence on that whole field. At least with government funding, there is a mechanism for kicking up a fuss.”
Brooks, whose fortune has been made though a private equity business, has not simply handed over the cash and walked away. “We get help on the business-plan side,” says Tony Addison, executive director of the institute. It is “venture philanthropy”, says Brooks, an emerging field that blends donation with finance and management advice.
“There is a group of savvy donors who didn’t inherit their money, but made it through shrewd and careful judgement in a hands-on way. They apply those characteristics when they give their money away,” says Joanna Motion, from the UK’s Council for Advancement of Science Education. “That can mean a reassessment for universities: they have to be prepared to treat these donors as insiders, more than perhaps they are used to.”
Hemingway points out that some philanthropic grants are narrowly focused. “It is not like an academic grant where you are given the money and if one avenue doesn’t work you change [direction] or, if you find something a little bit more interesting, you do that.”
Often philanthropy does not cover the indirect costs of research. Universities must still pick up the bill for administration, building operations and maintenance. — Â