David’s piece is superb, and the Pope Center’s next paper will deal with this issue in detail. University officials will smile and take your money, making reassurances on how they’ll respect your intentions — then grab the funds for their own purposes at the first opportunity.

The Florida State case is enlightening. The Koch opponents (the folks who go into spasms of rage at the very name because their ideological handlers have said that the Kochs are terrible people) claim that the FSU program is an attack on “academic freedom.” But who is being punished for saying or writing anything? No one. Just as language in the Constitution is often tortured to mean things it wasn’t supposed to, the concept of academic freedom has been distorted to mean that if any existing faculty member dislikes new and “outside” ideas, his academic freedom has been trampled upon unless he gets a veto.