UnHerd magazine: Samuel Rubinstein spends a summer with Edward Gibbon. An excerpt:
Both in his Memoirs and in Decline and Fall, Gibbon endorsed Adam Smith’s suggestion that university education would be improved if, instead of receiving a fixed stipend, lecturers were tipped by their students. The salaried professor, after all, made a mockery of the pursuit of learning for its own sake: Aristotle or Plato would never have “degenerated from the example of Socrates as to exchange knowledge for gold”. Perhaps it was not just his fervent anticlericalism, therefore, that so ruffled academic feathers.
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