Material independence from funders is easier to preach than to maintain.

Evidence

During the 1940s the Institute’s directors had alleged more or less bluntly that there was corruption among other émigrés resulting from their lack of material and psychological independence, and declared that research foundations had a highly developed capacity to distinguish between conformist and nonconformist academics. When they sought grants themselves, they were lucky: they were sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. Conservative though it was, it was easy to find a common denominator between the Institute’s views and the American Jewish Committee’s current interests, without suffering any loss of identity. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 505

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Milgrom/Champagne Fairs material on how reputational and institutional structures discipline actors — here the funder relationship performs the disciplining function. — connects to: Freedom requires material independence from another’s arbitrary will — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 173
• DEFINE: Defines the Institute’s self-understanding as a research body whose independence was constitutive of its identity, not incidental.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Freedom requires material independence from another’s arbitrary will — Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and…, 173