re: #14 Obdicut

business.timesonline.co.uk

George Soros is to create a new economics institute at Oxford University.

It is part of an attempt to steer the discipline away from the champions of the free market and deregulation who, the billionaire financier believes, share the blame for the global economic crisis.

The institute, as yet unnamed, is being funded by the New York-based Institute for New Economic Thinking (Inet), a think-tank and educational and grant-giving organisation founded last October with a $50 million pledge from Mr Soros to stimulate debate about the role of government regulation in the economy and financial markets.

Both Inet and the new Oxford economics institute reflect Mr Soros’s frustration at the way global financial markets work on the premise that markets can be left to their own devices. He believes that the current crisis has shown the reverse to be true.
….
Mr Soros has donated $5 million to Oxford’s James Martin 21st Century School, which is putting in another $5 million, to create the new institute, which will be headed by Professor Sir David Hendry, a fellow of Nuffield College. It is the first of a dozen or so that Mr Soros hopes to set up at leading universities worldwide. Inet is talking to Cambridge as well as higher education universities in Germany, France, China, Italy and the United States, where there have been discussions under way with Princeton, Columbia and New York University.

Oxford was chosen for the first institute because Mr Soros believed that Britain was more open to broadening the economic debate than the US, Mr Johnson said.

I should have mentioned that the money Koch gave to MIT was meant to be spent in a specific manner also:

web.mit.edu

The $100 million gift is the fifth largest in MIT’s history. Ground will be broken for the new building, which will be located next to the David H. Koch Biology Building and across Main Street from the Broad Institute, in March 2008.

What makes the new institute unique is the concept of pooling MIT’s molecular geneticists and cell biologists with engineers.

“This is a new approach to cancer research with the potential to uncover breakthroughs in therapies and diagnostics,” Koch said. “Conquering cancer will require multidisciplined initiatives and MIT is positioned to enable that collaboration.

I shouldn’t be surprised that you would think it’s a bad idea that students are able to get different POV’s while in a university setting but I am. We wouldn’t want kids to get the idea that there are different ways to address a problem when their betters have already made that assumption for them.