Hal Jackman, the very tall philanthropist, has just committed $30 mil to the U of Toronto for a Humanities Centre.
I'm all for the humanities, but I wonder what a value-for-money audit would show here. News story suggests much of the money goes to refurbish an old office building to provide more profs' offices.
U of T's billion-dollar fund-raising campaign has been so successful they had to keep raising the targets. But when you give a fortune to a university, do you get new contributions to (in this case) the humanities? Or do you just sustain a big complacent institutional bureaucracy?
Oh, the humanities!
