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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   24619 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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Hm, arguably that's a function that certain employment laws and HR departments are already filling. I can't say I like the idea of companies being required to financially support one specific partisan ideology. But this does remind me of something I saw on Twitter the other day - which I don't know how true it is - that it was strange that modern billionaires didn't found universities like their equivalents from prior generations. I don't really see a workable way for the government to force them to do such a thing which wouldn't be far too corrupt to be worth it, though, since the idea that schools ought not be ideological indoctrination centers is, in itself, a politically controversial position. Same issues would exist for scholarships.

It isn't true. The most recent private secular accredited non-profit university is Minerva University, founded by the former CEO of Snapfish. There's also the University of Austin, co-founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, which is not accredited but is a candidate for accreditation; while the people who complain that billionaires don't found universities jeer at that one, jeering doesn't actually make it go away.

And of course there's a lot of schools, programs, buildings, etc at existing universities endowed by tech billionaires.

I suspect it's much more difficult, both because of regulation and because of market saturation, to found a worthwhile new university today than it was when Leland Stanford founded his.

I suspect it's much more difficult, both because of regulation and because of market saturation, to found a worthwhile new university today than it was when Leland Stanford founded his.

Yeah. You've got to plug into the already-rotten university system of peer review in order to get any significant research done, any sort of a major metro will likely absolutely mug you when it comes time to try and build a campus. Meanwhile in most Western countries the vast majority of 'new universities' are blatant visa mills.

Even before that, Monaghan cashed out to found Ave Maria. Plenty of billionaires embark on intellectual patronage.

I didn't say I liked it. I said it's the actual demand.

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