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From: elg@usl (Eric Lee Green)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: unused gifts
Message-ID: <155@usl>
Date: Fri, 4-Sep-87 13:42:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: usl.155
Posted: Fri Sep  4 13:42:09 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Sep-87 04:09:07 EDT
References: <407@ndsuvax.UUCP> <52800002@hplabsb.UUCP>
Reply-To: elg@killer.UUCP (Green Eric Lee)
Organization: Univ. of Southwestern La., Lafayette
Lines: 41

In article <52800002@hplabsb.UUCP> marvit@hplabsb.UUCP (Peter Marvit) writes:
>>   Why do companies doante equipment to prestigious schools which those
>>schools either do not want or do not have planned uses for, when there are
>>many deserving schools that would be delighted to develop plans and compete
>>for the gifts? 

>The smaller schools, because of their equipment-paucity also face the
>double bind of technical unsophitication.  I have seen several cases where
>smaller schools have received state of the art hardware which sat unsed for
>nearly a year because no one at the school knew what to do with them. Or
>the school did not have the (people) resources to set them up.  Or there
>wasn't enough continuity for proper systems administration.  Or they didn't
>know UNIX or C or...  The question, of course, is how to get these schools
>into the 20th century with a minimum of fuss.  But why should a company
>take yet another chance of donating high performance graphics workstations
>to a school which is still using a batch Univac 90/30 as its primary 
>teaching computer?  Would you give a Lamborghini to someone who drives a
>horse and buggy?

There are many schools besides MIT and UCB which have up-to-date equipment yet
don't get much external support. Just look at the roster of PhD-CS granting
institutions, and you'll find that most of them do have the equipment, staff,
and academic knowledge to use equipment grants for all sorts of useful
purposes (both to the company and to the school). You'll also note that even
though this is true, the majority of the PhD granting departments get little
or nothing in the way of corporate support.

The companies making donations to "name" institutions seem to make the same
decision as those that choose to pursue the IBM PC software market... the
market is saturated, and you'll probably lose your buns or at least never make
a profit (after all, for every 1-2-3, there's hundreds of spreadsheets that
have fallen by the wayside), but they still take the gamble of the big name
despite the smaller risk of writing for a smaller (but still substantial)
market... to apply that analogy to corporate donations, most "name"
universities are pretty much saturated with equipment, and aren't going to do
much with most new equipment donated to them, but corporations still donate
it, taking the gamble that someone WILL use it and do something profitable,
despite the smaller universities that would be GLAD to make use of it...

   Eric Green {ihnp4,cbosgd}!killer!elg, elg@usl.CSNET
(Note the different address!!!)