Arthur Edwards on Jan 16 posts a useful and tempered response to my request
for more balance in references to "taking the king's shilling". A thorough
rejoinder could encompass a whole book, so I'll limit this to one point.

Edwards writes:
"Its not clear to me why one shouldn't be able to be funded 'from all
sides' as long as the strength of one's character is a match for the
temptation to bow to Caesar (or indeed Rockefeller)."

The cumulative weight of social and professional pressures is not always
"clear": we absorb them from an early age, as documented for example in
Loewen's book, "Lies my Teacher Told Me". Sometimes they are more overt.
Below is a factoid from a paper I gave at the HES meetings in June 2006, and
later published (AJES 67(1), January 2008, pp. 119-41), and have also posted
on www.masongaffney.org.

"America's schools of forestry have become adjuncts of the industry, as
their deans troll for grants and avoid offense. They influence many
scholarly journals. A leading Professor of Forestry threatened to retaliate
professionally if I wrote that timber owners in 1944 secured preferential
capital-gains tax treatment, while troops overseas were receiving 1040 Forms
at mail-call-a soldier's meager pay is "ordinary" income. A current incident
illustrates the culture of complaisance with industry demands. An apolitical
graduate student in the School of Forestry at Corvallis, Daniel Donato,
found evidence that certain salvage logging practices retard regeneration.
This finding troubled industry officers and allied State legislators. These
admonished the Dean, writing in the familiar, insolent tone a king might use
with his jester. The Dean and some senior professors joined an effort to
stop Science from publishing the findings (Boxall and Wilson, 2006, L.A.
Times, June 11, p.1).

Edwards also asks:

"Does public=state (as in public university) or is it the case that
a university is de facto a 'public institution' notwithstanding its
source of funding?"

It is more the case, in my experience (I am 86) that state universities are
heavily swayed by their constant quest for private funding.  The taxpayers
provide the base support; administrators look for frosting on the cake from
private donors, and pressure their faculty to do likewise.

Mason Gaffney