I write about money more often than ever before at my day job. I’m not naïve and understand that research can be costly and professors don’t work for the love of it, but money has become the barometer of worth. Small grants can be ignored regardless of the intrinsic worth of the research. Big dollars means big media splash. The percentage of staff devoted to “development” has metastasized. Shilling is a fulltime job. I’m not against money. I look forward to payday. But, selfishly, it’s no fun to write about. It’s boring.
Last year
at Kaboom Books here in Houston I found
a first American edition of Kingsley Amis’ A
Look Round the Estate: Poems, 1957–1967 (1968) and couldn’t resist. “A
Tribute to the Founder” suggests that the disproportionate emphasis on money at
universities, and industrial-scale philanthropy in general, is nothing new:
“By bluster,
graft, and doing people down,
Sam Baines
got rich, but mellowing at last,
Felt that by
giving something to the town
He might
undo the evils of his past.
“His hope
was to prevent the local youth
From making
the mistakes that he had made:
Choosing
expediency instead of truth,
And quitting
what was honest for what paid.
“A
university seemed just the thing,
And that old
stately home the very place.
Sam wept
with pleasure at its opening.
He died too
soon to weep at its disgrace.
“Graft is
refined among the tea and scones,
Bluster (new
style) invokes the public good,
And
doing-down gets done in pious tones
That Sam
tried to put on, but never could.”
2 comments:
I can't imagine that money would be much fun to write about either, but I think Trollope must have felt differently. Money is his great subject; it's to him what war was to Homer, and he is able to make it just as engaging. (I've just read my daily three chapters of The Eustace Diamonds, so the subject is on my mind!)
At the large non-profit where I once worked, the saying was "Bad men make big gifts". The names on our buildings were a kind of rogues' gallery of dubiously acquired wealth. Some of these donors were tough, determined guys from poor backgrounds who fought their way to the top of cut-throat fields. I can't condemn them.
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