@Cue7 , you make your good if repetitive point about the need to repair the Endowment, but don’t despair. Teams with small payrolls sometimes win pennants, and some ballgames are won in the ninth inning. Billionaires aren’t always humanly or politically successful. My uncle gave me good advice a long time ago: Play your own game, my boy, but play smart!
Correct me if I’ve got you wrong, but it seems to me you are talking about more than the instrumental uses of wealth. Hutchins’s mistake in your book would be that he remodeled the undergraduate experience such that it no longer looked very much like that of the Ivy League. There were way too many “that kids” in its classes, too few wealthy ones, no sports, no Gentlemen’s C’s, no starlets. Too many ideas flying around, too much intensity, not enough leisure. The main event was assembling for a night of study and brainstorming in the library, of reading (or at least claiming to have read) and volubly discussing Wittgenstein or Heidegger, and so on. You were made miserable by all that. Even if the Endowment had flourished under it, you would have hated it just for what it was. These were lost years for you. On cc you exact your revenge for all that.
That’s how I read you. What you are really after is the eradication of all that is traditional or distinctive in Chicago education and students because you have a loathing for them. Have I got you right?