Part of being a student — even an old one, like me — is spending time in the library. As I write this, I am sitting in the Firestone Library at Princeton University, looking up at a wall festooned with names of honored, illustrious alumni and super-rich donors, two categories that do not always, or even mostly, intersect.

On the wall directly in front of me are the names Donald Rumsfeld, George Will, and Paul Sarbanes (that last one might need a memory jolt: He was a senator from Maryland for roughly 800 years). And while those names carry a lot of associations, they’re basically normal-sounding modern American names, unlike, say, Chauncey Brewster Tinker, who was an English professor at Yale in the last century, and whose name was on a few walls there.