Yeah, this is also good for donors. When you donate money to a professor's work through a university, the university ends up taking maybe a 30% cut. But if you

Yeah, this is also good for donors. When you donate money to a professor's work through a university, the university ends up taking maybe a 30% cut. But if you donate to some independent institute that's controlled by the same professor, the university gets no cut. It's annoying organizationally, though, since employees can't just hop between the sides. So it makes it harder to have a sane reporting structure, and encourages the pseudo-flat "nobody technically has a boss but also nobody is empowered to promote you" academic style.