I’m Head of Operations for the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at Oxford University. OpenPhil is GPI’s largest donor, and Nick Beckstead was the program officer who made that grant decision.
I can’t speak for other universities, but I agree with his assessment that Oxford’s regulations make it much more difficult to use donations get productivity enhancements than it would be at other non-profits. For example, we would not be able to pay for the child care of our employees directly, nor raise their salary in order for them to be able to pay for more child care (since there is a standard pay scale). I therefore believe that the reason he gave for ruling out university-based grantees is the true reason, and one which is justified in at least some cases.
But what about paying for teaching duties (i.e. using the finding to cover the teaching load of a given researcher)? Teaching is one of the main issues when it comes to time spent on research, and this would mean that OU can’t accept the funding framework within quite common ERC grants that have this issue covered. This was my point all along.
Second, what about the payment for a better equipment? That was another issue mentioned in Nick’s post.
Finally, the underlying assumption of Nick’s explanation is that the output of non-academic workers will be better within the given projects than the output of the non-academic workers, which is a bold claim and insufficiently explicated in the text he provided. Again: I don’t know which projects we are assessing here and without that knowledge we cannot make an adequate assessment. Anything else would be a mere speculation. I am just making a plea for higher transparency given the complexity of these issues.
I’m Head of Operations for the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at Oxford University. OpenPhil is GPI’s largest donor, and Nick Beckstead was the program officer who made that grant decision.
I can’t speak for other universities, but I agree with his assessment that Oxford’s regulations make it much more difficult to use donations get productivity enhancements than it would be at other non-profits. For example, we would not be able to pay for the child care of our employees directly, nor raise their salary in order for them to be able to pay for more child care (since there is a standard pay scale). I therefore believe that the reason he gave for ruling out university-based grantees is the true reason, and one which is justified in at least some cases.
But what about paying for teaching duties (i.e. using the finding to cover the teaching load of a given researcher)? Teaching is one of the main issues when it comes to time spent on research, and this would mean that OU can’t accept the funding framework within quite common ERC grants that have this issue covered. This was my point all along.
Second, what about the payment for a better equipment? That was another issue mentioned in Nick’s post.
Finally, the underlying assumption of Nick’s explanation is that the output of non-academic workers will be better within the given projects than the output of the non-academic workers, which is a bold claim and insufficiently explicated in the text he provided. Again: I don’t know which projects we are assessing here and without that knowledge we cannot make an adequate assessment. Anything else would be a mere speculation. I am just making a plea for higher transparency given the complexity of these issues.