Frank Kogan

the democracy-via-transcendence point is well-taken, and i know enough about the currents and crossflow of the english civil war to accept this

the first point is more complicated -- i think the point you're making (about where the money's coming from) has only had heft quite recently, even in america: the last few decades at most... prior to that, certainly up to the 60s, budgetary decisions were the purlieu of a technocratic management elite

certainly in respect of the creation of the modern university -- in the early 19th century -- out of its immediate predecessors, where scholarship that wasn't actually fostered within the church was paid for by the patronage of the aristocracy or small royalty, didn't really veer off from the socrates-plato-aristotle model

so two millennia plus of my model, followed by 150 years of a model ruled (as much as anything) by the manoeuvrings of imperialist superpowers*, then, post-WW2, a half-century maybe of the new model you're talking about