>Academic institutions didn't spring up out of charity //
Are you sure? Didn't the library of Alexandria invite academics and give them bed-and-board to stay and study? (It may have been one of the other early libraries??) With the aim to expand human knowledge. Yes wealth will always have a relationship with knowledge/wisdom but that doesn't mean supporting academia has to have other than altruistic basises.
Weren't a lot of early academic institutions monastic, seeing accrual of knowledge as a service to the world by leading to greater understanding of the creator? (Which you kinda intimate.) Isn't that "charity"?
I don't think arrangements at the library of Alexandria are known in that kind of detail. (I've read a couple books about it, and most of the sources they use are from much later.) It was founded and funded by the Ptolemies as what you could plausibly call the first research university. Probably it was some combination of knowledge-is-power (it was an era of technical progress -- e.g. you know Eratosthenes and the size of the Earth? Eratosthenes was head of the library, and his work included basically inventing geography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes#.22Father_of_geog... a subject of obvious interest to a new bureaucratic state), prestige, and genuine curiosity/cultivation on the part of the first few Ptolemies.
Are you sure? Didn't the library of Alexandria invite academics and give them bed-and-board to stay and study? (It may have been one of the other early libraries??) With the aim to expand human knowledge. Yes wealth will always have a relationship with knowledge/wisdom but that doesn't mean supporting academia has to have other than altruistic basises.
Weren't a lot of early academic institutions monastic, seeing accrual of knowledge as a service to the world by leading to greater understanding of the creator? (Which you kinda intimate.) Isn't that "charity"?