alt Hacker NewsYes maybe it was a class thing.
It's just astonishing how many universities / institutes were founded from ~1800-1900ish by rich industrialists to varying degrees - Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, U of Chicago, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, WPI, RPI, NYU, Purdue, CalTech, . (Some of these are sort of public-private partnership "land grants")
Maybe it's also a change in tax policy or relative cost of capital vs labor (universities are now expensive to operate due to their staff, not the buildings/land).
Meanwhile the only schools you see being founded in the last 30 years are scam for-profits / virtual universities / diploma mills. One of these scams were even run by one of our presidential candidates.
The work of Vermeer was largely brought to the world by the van Ruijven family.
Henry Wriothesley gave us Shakespeare.
Archduke Rudolph allowed Beethoven to echo down the ages.
Bezos has a really big boat that requires bridges to be dismantled to move it.
The wealthy of the past were a different caliber of people. Maybe the simplicity of life kept them more grounded?