That's true, but much of the government support has historically come via education funding. For example, most of the University of California campuses have solid research, but a large portion of their money, which provides the base funding for the infrastructure and salaries, comes from their educational mission: grants from the state educational department tied to the number of students they educate, plus, in recent years (as those grants have fallen) tuition/fees. If we decide that we don't really need to educate people that way anymore, then the University of California system should be much smaller (if it still exists at all), and those researchers are going to have to find somewhere else to research, or leave research and do something else.

If that happened, California could take the money they aren't spending on the UC system anymore, and decide just to fund research directly, setting up a state research institution that isn't a university. Maybe they will; I have no idea.

Makes sense. Though again, that's not exactly breaking the back of an existing monopoly. Frankly if you wanted to do direct research funding the obvious mechanism would be just to increase the direct grants paid right now, which are going to existing university faculty.

I think you and the grandparent both seem to be arguing that "removing the undergraduates and sending them to MOOCs" will somehow change the character of the way "academia" works, and that's what I just don't see. Undergraduates are a side project at these schools -- as mentioned, they don't provide meaningful funding (tuition breaks even at best). And at most, they provide a cheap labor pool for the research programs. Take them away and you'd never notice the difference.

I expect the top tier schools will see their positions strengthened while everyone else sees the bottom fall out from underneath them. There are private schools that, rather than having a big endowment, have large amounts of debt which require revenue growth to service.

"If you want a top-tier university go and buy one"

You mean like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Abdullah_University_of_Sci...

$10 billion endowment: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1204482....

Pretty much. Though this particular institution is (IMHO) going to have trouble effectively spending that endowment because of the difficulty of recruiting top-tier faculty willing to live in Saudi Arabia. That's a disadvantage that Tokyo or Amsterdam aren't likely to have, so I'd look elsewhere for a good existence proof.

Oh no, I agree entirely. I'd say this is proof that you can't buy a world class university although time will tell. They haven't been around long enough to establish a reputation.

But there are other data points. Stanford's rise to prominence in the 1960's (people forget that for quite some time it was a tiny college with no notoriety at all) was driven by almost exactly this kind of thing: they came into a huge endowment and embarked on an affirmative program to recruit top-tier talent in a big list of fields. And it worked.

Obviously details matter. A university in Riyadh is going to be disadvantaged vs. one in Palo Alto, but the idea that professors can be encouraged to move by big paychecks shouldn't be controversial.

NYU has been been buying its way up the reputation ladder for the past 15 years.

They just bought Caltech's president.