Private wealth alone allowed the Frankfurt Institute to exist independently of the university

Evidence

Apart from the goodwill and support of the ministry, the decisive factor ensuring Weil and Gerlach success in their project of creating an institute connected to the university but independent from it, and directly answerable to the ministry, was the generosity of its endowment in a period of poverty and financial restriction. The Weils were prepared to finance the building and equipment of the Institute; to pay it a yearly grant of 120,000 marks; to offer the lower floor to the university’s Faculty of Economics and Social Science; and even, later on, to fund the professorial chair which the Institute’s director held in that faculty. The Economics and Social Science Faculty, which was disturbed by the extent of the Institute’s independence, was suffering from such extreme shortage of space as a result of a rapid increase in student numbers that it was soon pressing to speed up the establishment of the Institute. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 66

Categorization

• XREF: The independence-through-endowment dynamic parallels the extralegal institutional creation patterns in Milgrom’s law-merchant and bourse material. — connects to: The Frankfurt School’s founding endowment came from a wartime profiteer’s fortune — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 42; Losing financial independence forced the Frankfurt Institute to accept research contracts — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1858; The Institute’s financial independence freed radical scholarship from the rigid German academy — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 100 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• The Institute’s financial independence freed radical scholarship from the rigid German academy #expands (0.85) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 100
• Losing financial independence forced the Frankfurt Institute to accept research contracts #contradicts (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1858