I'm thinking I might try and get my university involved in this by seeing if I can get them to run BOINC on all the public computers on campus, ideally by setting it up to run on an administrator account, immediately on startup, so that student users can't mess with it. Of course, what with current economics, my university isn't likely to shell out for the additional energy costs just for humanitarian reasons, so I thought I might try appealing to their wallets. Unfortunately, I don't know much about accounting or law or anything like that, so I need to ask around a bit, starting here. With that, how does this email (for the Provost's office) sound for starting things off

Hello, this is <redacted>. I'm a senior in <redacted> here at <redacted>. I recently had an interesting idea that I think might be helpful to the University's budget, but I don't have the law or accounting background necessary to know if it's in any way feasible. Since your work is so closely tied to budgeting, I thought that you might be the best-placed person to give an answer. Essentially, what I have in mind is converting some necessary operating costs of the University (in this case, power costs for public computers) into charitable donations, without negatively affecting their performance. What I don't know is whether or not that's a significant cost, or even whether or not such a conversion would save the University any money at all. If you could help answer those questions, I would appreciate it greatly. Let me know if there's any more information you'd need.

Thank you for your time,
<redacted>

Well, it turns out they don't actually pay taxes, being a government organization. I was afraid of that. So I can't appeal to saving money, so I'll just see if I can't convince them on the PR grounds, and maybe put up some information on bulletin boards for students.

If you're a student at that university, have you considered setting up a new BOINC project there, aimed at something that university in interested in? You might then have to pass it on to other students later, but what I've seen suggests that to be one of the more successful ways of getting a university to allow some of their computers to be used for BOINC projects.