Bohemian. You’ve got me. As for Holmes, I’d have said anyone who fired a revolver in his own rented rooms to spell out “V. R.” on the wall rated at least some points for Bohemianism. Not to mention drugs and music. (Was Holmes any good with a violin? Poor Mrs. Hudson.)

The limits of government and higher education: No, I wasn’t talking about the NEA, nor the publishing houses. (I was a little surprised to hear that still went on. I thought merging into media conglomerates would eventually get rid of pet writers who don’t earn back advances.) But I understood a number of “first tier” universities to be taxpayer funded, and more taxpayer money goes to some of the larger private universities than they really want to discuss. Apart from outright grants, there are papers, legal opinions, studies of one sort or another, and some actual scholarship or scientific research. I don’t know how you’d check it, but I suspect the Ivy League will receive more of the recent “stimulus” money than some of the smaller state governments–but it will come in so many different forms it would take a small army of accountants to keep track.

Does anyone else remember how quickly the private schools all folded on restrictions on recruiting when the Federal government threatened to take them off the list for contracts if they persisted? And I think that may only have been DoD contracts. It certainly didn’t include students loans, government scholarships. or the GI Bill.

I may be wrong, but the value these institutions place on federal money seems to me to indicate that it’s more of their budget than they’d like to discuss in public. Of course, that’s also true of the Sierra Club and Planned Parenthood. As Jefferson could have told you, a government spending money on this scale can corrupt a lot of individuals and institutions.

(Incidentally, since the universities involved all insisted it was a matter of principle until the feds mentioned money, it is now possible to set an upper limit on the financial value of their principles to many American universities.)

When every freshman congressman goes to the Kennedy School of Government at taxpayer expense for “orientation,” I think it’s fair to say any malcontents in residence at Harvard are at least partially government-funded–and that they’re quite happy with THAT function of the establishment.

Every town has them, although they don’t usually go so far as to live in the woods like a hermit, and they aren’t always gainfully employed. They don’t dress or act like most people around them. They don’t actually belong to much of a subculture, either, although they may be part of a small group of friends who party together. They might have some residual marriage or birth family connections, but they’ve tended to wear out their welcome with these groups over the years. They may have casual or nodding acquaintances with others in their area, although they don’t see the need to actually participate in any usual or commonplace form of social interaction, whether it’s going to the opera or drinking in a country bar or, well, bathing or visiting laundromats. Once in a while they might do a little hell-raising, particularly in their younger years, but they usually aren’t criminal masterminds although they may engage in minor criminal acts to get by. They’ve generally got no respect or regard at all for people in authority.

What they aren’t, as a general rule, is artistic or intellectual in any public sense. Some may be very well-read, or at least well-read in whatever area interests them, but they don’t *do* anything with it. They aren’t public speakers or teachers. They aren’t the Socrates type. They may well have existed back into antiquity, but they aren’t and weren’t of much interest to anyone except the occasional busybody who thinks they are ‘weird’ and therefore dangerous and should be locked up on general principles.

A small percentage of this group may well have had enough interest in the wider society to become influential in it, but assuming that because some geniuses led ‘irregular’ lives, irregular lives must be a sign of genius is surely illogical.