Slashdot Mirror
The Lack of Scientific Philanthropy In Japan
ananyo writes "The University of Tokyo this week will unveil Japan's first institute named after a foreign donor: the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe. The announcement adds Norwegian philanthropist Fred Kavli's name, along with a US$7.5-million endowment, to one of Japan's most successful institutes. The new center marks a turning point for Japan: to date, the country's universities and research institutes have long had to make do with few philanthropic donations. Strict laws governing university finances, and the lack of a philanthropic tradition, have discouraged the gifts that serve Western institutions so well. To get around the laws, instead of handing the endowment over to the institute, the Kavli Foundation will continue to manage the sum, giving the institute the return on the funds."
Here, I think "Western institutions" should be understood as "mainly in the US, and to some extent the UK and the English-speaking world". To the best of my knowledge, in all other countries the situation is closer to that in Japan than in the US: the bulk of academic research is performed by public institutions using public funds.
Gravitation is a theory, not a fact.
Why do my moderator points never come when I need them?
a) Philanthropists don't pay for Japanese whaling. It's paid for by corporate investment, government tax breaks, and profits from the sale of whale meat at such popular restaurants as Gansokujira-ya (http://r.gnavi.co.jp/g584700/lang/en/) In this way, it's quite similar to other food-based industries around the world, like the beef industries in the USA and Australia.
b) There are many good excuses for making despicable things acceptable. Luckily, the sustainable whaling taking place in the Southern Ocean isn't despicable. I mean, seriously, it's probably the only sustainable "fishing" market on the planet. Why would anyone complain about it?
c) Finally, whales can't talk, so asking them what they think probably won't result in any useful answers.
Obviously it is not common in Japanese culture to do such big donations. Most likely their society and culture works different from the US/UK culture. This hardly classifies as a problem. Honestly, they have most likely other ways to finance education and science. And when I look at their industry and how good they are with their products, well I guess their system works.
BTW: I do not want a totally US-ified world. It is great to be different.
Eat monkeys not whales.
"The gifts that serve Western insitutions so well"
Nonsense.
"The gifts that serve US institutions so well". FTFY.
One more typical example of a Slashdot poster / submitter / "author" assuming that US="The western world".
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Ok.
Before we criticize why they can't donate money easily in Japan, let's think a second.
Imagine that I am rich (and perverted, but then I repeat myself).
Imagine that I really like [insert my favorite not so useful subject. Ok. it's B**bs].
I donate X Billions to University Y IF they study b00b enhancement.
We now have the Countries Finest NOT studying cancer cure...
Or if we want a real world example.
Wall Street sucking up all the smart brains so that they can program the computers than then battle in Economical World War 3.
I think that there might have been good intention for stopping private interest to buy/"donate to" the world of Academia.
Just my 0.05¥
In a good system the resources are already there, and as far as I know that is pretty much the case in Japan. So the only logical conclusion is: "Philanthropy is a solution to a problem that shouldn't (and in this case doesn't) exist."
As a Tokyo U. graduate who had more or less no difficulty obtaining nearly $200k to spend on my PhD work while a student, believe me when I tell you that U-T is rather well off. OK, that's an anecdote, but I know you like data, so how about some anecdata:
The University of Tokyo - the only winner?
In particular, note the horrific Figure 1 on the top left of page 2. See the dot way up there? There's Tokyo University, getting assloads more research money than any other university in Japan, even though it doesn't have a whole lot more staff to spend it. Well, that's the data part, here's the anecdote:
The linked document is actually an article written by a University of Tokyo staffer attempting to dispel the "myth" (= fact) that Tokyo University gets way more funding, per person, than any other university (or research institute) in Japan! Amazing.
Though having said that, it's perfectly understandable. As anyone who has spent even a year working in Japanese academia will attest, knowing how to lie with a straight face is probably the single best skill one can bring to their career. Sure, that talent can give you a career boost pretty much anywhere, but in Japan, it's a really big deal. French is for love, perl is for line noise, and - just trust me on this one, dear reader - Japanese is for lying.
It's little wonder, then, that research institutes in Japan are so backward (relative to their insane budgets). (Reason #2, for anyone still reading, is that retirement at (or close to) age 60 is compulsory for all academics, which cuts brutally short the careers of those few brilliant researchers who can pass on their expertise to future generations.)
tl; dr: anyone donating to Tokyo University is stupid and/or has been deceived; it's already bleeding cash.
The fact that it was, previously, unsustainable, pushing many species to the verge of extinction.
So the international community realised that's a bad thing, because if said species go extinct, entire ecosystems dependent on those species go extinct, less food in the ocean for everyone, loss of species of scientific significance, we're all worse off. As such the international community decided to stop, limiting it to sustainable levels where possible, banning it completely in the case of species that had been hunted to the point of extinction so that they could recover.
The problem is Japan, and a tiny handful of other countries (i.e. Iceland) think they're fucking special and somehow have a right to carry on whaling when everyone else has stopped/drastically cut down. If every country acted like Japan and just said "fuck it" then there'd be no whales left.
So that's what's wrong with it, it's fucking selfish, it's no more culturally significant to Japan than many other countries that have stopped, so their claims of having some special cultural heritage to protect that no one else does are frankly a load of bollocks. It's like being in a swimming pool, and some selfish fuck ruining it for everyone by peeing in the pool when everyone else recognises that's not a reasonable thing to do. Japan is that selfish fuck.
No one is saying all whaling should be banned no matter what, or anything quite to that extent (well, some crazy environmentalists might, but they're not the ones at the debating table) just that it should be sustainable, and that it should be sustainable for everybody, not just the twats who think they're special and the rules don't apply to them such that they believe they can hog some shared resource all to themselves leaving none for anyone else.
In a good system the resources are already there, and as far as I know that is pretty much the case in Japan. So the only logical conclusion is: "Philanthropy is a solution to a problem that shouldn't (and in this case doesn't) exist."
The problem with funding like this is that it empties public research into private ownership by making funding the goal of schools. The first and foremost goal of schools is and should be to teach.
In California, we have this terrible system which from the article seems to be on the brink of being exported to Japan.
To put things in perspective, almost 36% of all taxes in California go to education ($49 Billion FY2012-2013 : http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/agencies.html), and that's not including money from bond initiatives for stem cell research or other earmarks which end up at research universities, and it's not including the costs of education as part of rehabilitation for the mentally ill or incarcerated prisoners, which end up being another $18B (drill down on the numbers on that government site).
If you consider only K-12, there are 9,600 publicly funded schools serving 6.2M students (http://www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fb/index.asp); that's a cost of $63,000 per student, working out to ~$4M per school.
And the teachers at the schools in my area are constantly trying to raise funds for books, paper, pencils, and white board markers. At $63,000 per student per year, you'd think they'd buy them a damn box of pencils.
Before you try to claim "that's not a lot per student", realize that the median household income in California is less than that, it's just under $61,000 for the whole family, including all wage earners (U.S. Census : http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06000.html).
I don't know where the hell all this money is going (I'd like an independent audit, please!) but it sure as hell isn't getting to the classrooms, so it has to be disappearing somewhere between the Franchise Tax Board and the classrooms.
As far as higher education is concerned, the colleges around here are canceling classes all over the place. You'd think that the more students they had, the more tuition they'd get, the more classes they'd have, but no, tuition collected is a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the almost $10B in taxes paid to them by the state, and they optimize on the basis of revenue instead (hey, why have a student spend 4 years * tuition, when you can cancel a class and have them spend 5 years * tuition instead?). They also optimize it by preferentially admitting out of state students (who have to pay higher tuitions), but that's OK, those students can go to other states themselves, and pay out of state tuition there, instead.
And this is the model school system you are going to hold up for other countries to follow?
Japan: Save yourself before it's too late!
-- Terry
A lot of people in this thread seem to be coming to the defense of the Japanese university system, but what the poster said is basically true. In addition to not having much in donations, it's not as geared towards research like American schools, being instead more of a place to make good white-collar workers for their industries. They have fewer grad students and less research budgets. I would generally say that the US is better off in term of research.
See this article for an exception that proves the rule:
http://www.economist.com/node/21540228
And those saying that "It's a state matter, the state should fund all reasearch" - you do know that you can have both, right? In fact the US government spends gobs of money on research, the donations come on top of that.
Their current whaling program is sustainable, and the rules they abide by are set up by the IWC. Isn't that exactly what you are arguing for? Sustainable whaling? I'm not sure how you can jump from that position to then calling Japan 'fucking selfish'.
The problem is that non-whaling countries absolutely do want to see whaling come to a permanent end. Sustainable whaling was never going to be on the bargaining table, and as a result Japan has to take advantage of loopholes to continue its whaling program.
So which is it? Sustainable whaling for all countries, or not?
No, you're completely missing the point, even if Japan's catch is sustainable (it's quite arguably not for some species) why should whaling be limited to Japan?
The point is that other countries want to have a whaling industry too to provide food and income, but they understand they can't because it's unsustainable when everyone does it in an uncontrolled manner, so they practice restraint and choose not to. Japan however sees itself as special and doesn't see why it should have to practice restraint like everyone else, and so just selfishly goes out and maintains a whaling industry unilaterally.
Imagine that in 50 years time, we reach a point where there's fuck all oil left in the world and we're running renewables for power, but oil is still useful for production of a few important things that we haven't replaced, so the international community decides that we'll just keep the remaining oil wells for production of that essential product. Imagine then that one country says, you know what? fuck the international agreement, we'll just continue burning the remaining oil off for fuel because we're too lazy to change. That's what Japan's doing regards to whaling - it's decided it's needs are more important than those of any other country and hence the rules shouldn't apply to it. Essentially all IWC members could do what Japan does and cheat the system by claiming scientific whaling despite doing no science on said whales and instead just selling off the meat, but then there'd be no whales left for anyone to catch, and again, dependent ecosystems would also collapse.
The only reason there's a push for an outright ban on hunting some species is because said species are at risk, and because they're species which will take decades to replenish their numbers to more natural levels. No one's saying it has to be permanent, but for the forseeable future it's the only measure that will protect some species.
So yes, it's sustainable whaling for all countries - don't try and pretend anything I've said suggests otherwise. It doesn't, but the "all countries" part is key, and it means "Everyone - not just Japan, Iceland, Norway".