Poison ivy
A few years ago, at the Idler magazine, I wasted my breath declaring that we would never accept subsidies, and would be the unique and unusual Canadian magazine that could not be bought by the government, or by any political faction. My belief was that the cause of idleness was too holy and precious to be casually prostituted.
But I soon found that everyone who would put up money, for anything other than subscriptions, wanted something unscrupulous in return. It was usually political, for we were getting readers, but a generous new proprietor noticed that we were nevertheless losing money, and demanded that we go begging to the “Canada Council.”
I will end this story here, for already it has become unedifying. No one but a Saint will ever give his money away, without getting something in exchange; and, as a general rule, saints don’t have much money.
As Adam Smith wrote, “endowments,” such as they bank at Harvard and Yale and Oxford, are an unabating evil. They undermine the efficiency of any virtuous endeavour, often dramatically, and quickly turn it into a money-laundering scheme. They promote the wrong kind of idleness, and indeed, I recommend The Wealth of Nations for its pointed exposition of subsidized institutions, and especially for Book V, the second article, “Of the Expence of the Institutions for the Education of Youth.” Smith, who worked himself as a perfesser in Scotland, was painfully familiar with higher education, and with its generation of a class of lazy, indulgent, blowhard snobs.
This had been the mediaeval experience, too, when the universities were unfortunately invented and began their secular rise. They replaced the old cathedral schools, which had the merit that they trained people for actual, necessary jobs — in priestcraft. Adam Smith captures the permanent relation between work and learning. The universities cancelled that, and now we have the dissipation of “art for art’s sake.”
God’s blessings upon Trump, as he sets about destroying the academic life in America.