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A huge amount of the money in big endowments comes from various unsavory characters. The names of buildings at famous universities are a Who’s Who of famous for
by jacobolus 9y ago
A huge amount of the money in big endowments comes from various unsavory characters. The names of buildings at famous universities are a Who’s Who of famous fortunes built on slavery, war profiteering, drug running, child labor, wage theft and other worker abuse, large-scale environmental destruction, bribes and kickbacks, fraud, outright theft, etc.
The Saudis are a particularly unsavory monarchy (torture, arbitrary imprisonment, lack of basic political rights, foreign assassinations, sponsorship of terrorism, direct military attacks on foreign civilians, etc.), but not fundamentally different from many historical donors.
- rflrob 9y agoThe Saudi money is different in that the university administration today is seeking it out, as opposed to money from historical donors, which the current administration already has. Which is not to say that historical blood money, whether the direct result of (for instance) slave sales [1], or laundered as philanthropy from robber barons is ethically free and clear; rather, if your institution has long been engaged in taking that money, the very least you can do is stop taking it now. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-...