Simon’s Legacy Deserves No Praise

To the Editor:

Leslie Lenkowsky’s defense of the late William Simon’s systematic efforts to fund academics who agreed with his own free-market ideology, and to defund those who disagreed, is extremely flimsy (“William Simon’s Legacy to Philanthropy,” June 15).

It comes down to the claims, first, that leaders of the philanthropic world whom Simon attacked for funding the alleged enemies of capitalism were “defensive,” suggesting that Simon “had indeed struck a nerve.” But maybe they were not used to being assailed by a conservative activist, and when one is attacked, one defends.

His second point is that Simon’s roster of grantees increasingly “came to include more and more scholars of unquestionable excellence,” making the alleged encroachment on academic freedom “implausible.” But huge sums for liberals and leftists would almost surely also produce a roster of excellent scholars, pleased to receive a subsidy to advance their ideas and status. The structured bias would simply be reversed, with many excellent scholars with the views approved by Simon frozen out.

Using these feeble excuses, Lenkowsky misses the main point: The idea of a “free market in ideas,” which is the base of a democratic order, presupposes an unbiased access to resources sufficient to allow the best ideas to prevail based on their strength as ideas alone.

A systematic attempt to create an unlevel playing field for a particular ideology by subsidizing proper thinkers, and even more clearly by trying to disable the ability of improper thinkers to compete by bullying funders into denying them resources, is a gross violation of the democratic principles that underpin this society.

That kind of effort may have become more commonplace in the wake of Simon’s work, but this hardly proves its merits, and for many of us the institutionalization of this kind of bias is a cause of real concern.

Edward S. Herman
Professor Emeritus of Finance
Wharton School
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia