Not nothing

Last week I met with a member of the UNC faculty to discuss helping him with his finances. He waxed gloomily about the state of the university and how it was "disappearing before his eyes" or something like that.

I get it. You get used to being something one way and then it changes. University faculties came over the course of a few decades to believe that they had this really comfortable place that rightfully belonged to them within which they could do and say pretty much anything so long as they didn't go entirely off the rails having sex with students -- and superstars could honestly do that too so long as they were discreet about it. They drifted far from the sensibilities of their funding bases.

Professors loved to rail about how money ruled everything and that had deleterious effects on everything. They were not entirely wrong. What they got wrong is that, in terms of guiding one's practical behavior, while money and power are not everything, they are not nothing. Drift too far afield from your funding base and eventually you get spanked hard, particularly when the demographic winds are blowing directly in your face.