This review has been accessed times since September 9, 2004 Kirp, David L. (2003). Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. vi + 328 $29.95 ISBN 0-674-01146-5 Reviewed by John Rothfork Northern Arizona University September 9, 2004 For thirty years David L. Kirp has been a professor of public policy at UC–Berkeley, which he unabashedly promotes as the greatest university in the world because of the breadth of its interests and the wealth of its intellectual resources. Kirp is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, the founding director for the Center for Law and Education (http://www.cleweb.org/aboutcle.htm), and the author of more than a dozen books on education, race, and American sociology that express both a lawyer’s concern for what people do rather than what they say and an editor’s interest in telling a story. Professor Kirp’s homepage provides links to see a 43 minute interview with the author about Shakespeare and an even longer interview with him about the process of writing the book (http://socrates.berkeley.edu/%7Egspp/people/faculty/kirp.htm). Kirp says his interest in the theme of Shakespeare—how money is the driver, not just in fact, but as a value in American higher education—was aroused by his experience as an acting dean of the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at UC–Berkeley (p. 315). For those of us with a fuzzy notion about exactly what public policy studies might comprise, Kirp explains that we are familiar with political and economic interpretations of public life. Public policy provides a third view of public life based on a concern for individual rights and law. Higher education provides an interesting model for public policy issues because, says Kirp, “priorities in higher education are determined less by the institution itself than by multiple ‘constituencies’—students, donors, corporations, politicians—each promoting its vision” of the university (p. 4). As a UC–Berkeley faculty member, Kirp has an obvious stake in the university as an institution dedicated to: Values that the market does not honor: the belief in a community of scholars and not a confederacy of self-seekers; in the idea of openness and not ownership; in the professor as a pursuer of truth and not an entrepreneur; in the student as an acolyte whose preferences are to be formed, not a consumer whose preferences are to be satisfied (p. 7). Kirp does not, however, simply assume the moral high ground to claim that “universities represent something as ineffable as the common good” (p. 263) and then castigate the marketplace for failing to respect this. To be sure, he is himself dedicated to this belief, but his work is analytic and descriptive, seeking to assess the current balance between the marketplace and the commons, which has traditionally provided a refuge for the university from the full force of marketplace bottom line thinking. In fact, some readers may feel that in the early chapters Kirp plays too much of the observer role to describe how “prestige is the coin of the realm among the leading research universities and liberal arts colleges” (p. 4) and to consequently ignore “the lower rungs of the academic ladder” where “what matters are money and enrollment figures, not prestige” (p. 5). Supported by a Ford Foundation grant, Kirp and his graduate students visited more than a dozen schools ranging from The University of Chicago to the DeVry campus in Fremont (San Francisco) to see how the concern for money defines the policies and identity of American higher education. Kirp was the editor of his high school and college (Amherst) newspapers and continues to write for scores of magazines. So it is no surprise that many of the 13 chapters were first published in such journals as Change, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and University Business (p. 317). Despite this process and variously co-authored chapters, Kirp’s skill as both a writer and researcher (there are 49 pages of notes) make Shakespeare a unified and insightful study for anyone interested in the complex state of contemporary American post-secondary education. Recruiting is Advertising We may be surprised to learn that at elite schools “the nature of college admissions has evolved from counseling and gatekeeping to recruiting” (p. 61). Admissions counselors have become enrollment mangers competing to enroll as many students as possible with top SAT scores in order to enhance the prestige of their school. Miami University offers a graduate certificate and an M.S.Ed in enrollment management (http://www.education.miami.edu/Program/Programs.asp?Program_ID=25). Neither students nor managers seem interested in education in a discipline or profession. “What matters most in picking a college, students report, is not the quality of its education but rather its prestige” (p. 12). From the other direction, “enrollment managers regard students as customers and see a college education as the product students consume” (p. 16). This high school senior concern is inflated to define higher education. Most of us probably continue to think of the gatekeeper function of college admission staff at elite schools, “but the fortunes of a liberal arts college like Dickinson [PA] depend mainly on the caliber of its students. Everything else follows from attracting abler undergraduates—more alumni giving, more high-powered professors, greater public recognition” (p. 59). Both sides—market savvy students and enrollment managers—collude to subvert traditional educational concerns. Everything is about marketing and appearance. For example, students playing the prestige game can buy the services of Ivywise, which counsels—or packages—students “from nursery school to graduate school” for a fee of up to $29,000 for the purpose of gaining admission to elite institutions (http://www.ivywise.com/text/services.htm). This is almost twice the cost of tuition for an undergraduate degree at my university. Ivywise’s fee for the equivalent of an academic makeover is the same as a year’s tuition at Harvard (http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/03.25/06-tuition.html). Kirp comments that “It might be easier for these students actually to do something remarkable, like winning the Westinghouse science competition or getting a novel published, than to write the glittering application predictably generated by the Ivywise regimen” (p. 28). Kirp suggests that there is a simultaneous process of marketing and packaging on the part of students hoping to be admitted to prestigious schools and on the part of schools hoping to attract the best students. For example, Krip describes how Brown University enhanced its standing by abolishing distribution requirements in various curricular areas, cutting the hours required to obtain a degree, and allowing students to take all courses on a pass-fail basis (p. 22). “The college also marketed its product with textbook precision” by relying “on undergraduates as salespeople, flying them around the country to meet prospects” (p. 23). Kirp’s academic advice is likely to sound naïve to enrollment managers: make “need and merit, not market sophistication, the basic principles on which to allocate financial aid” (p. 32). Dying Elephants This term derides the “veneration of big-name professors” (p. 33) at prestigious universities like the University of Chicago, which Kirp nominates as an illustration of an elite institution contemptuous of market forces, even though it has done things like create “the nation’s biggest correspondence school” simply to raise money and more recently been forced to consider how to pay its bills to avoid bankruptcy (p. 34). By the 1990s “the university was running huge deficits and draining the institution’s modest endowment.” Hugo Sonnenschein, “a distinguished economist,” was appointed president (p. 34; (http://www.realuofc.org/admin/son.html). “When Sonnenschein arrived in 1994, the treasurer was projecting a $55 million annual deficit by the end of the decade. Already the deficits were eating away at a $1.5 billion endowment, the smallest among top-ranked private universities” (p. 43). Sonnenschein antagonized the faculty by “proposing to increase the undergraduate enrollment by 25 percent, to 4,500, within a decade” (pp. 36-7). This produced a decade long battle with faculty who represented the reverse of rapacious market forces. They were academic ostriches who refused to lift their heads out of the sand of their academic interests to consider the financial viability of the school. Almuni also feared “that, in the quest for students, Chicago’s distinctive culture would become just a marketing tool” (p. 34). The workforce, if it can be called that, of elite institutions is very different from that of more homely schools. Dying elephants, whose reputations were made at other institutions, are paid munificent salaries for their Nobel Prizes and for the prestige associated with their names. “Stealing luminaries from other universities,” by offering more money, “has been seen as the fastest way to climb the ladder of academic prestige” (p. 67). Whatever teaching the stars may do is something of an unexpected courtesy because “their bankable asset, depends on what they write, not how they teach” (p. 69). “Until a few years ago professors” at the University of Chicago “were not expected to teach any undergraduates.” Instead, “nearly two-thirds of classes are taught by graduate students and non-tenure track faculty” (p. 40). In addition, “at elite schools like Harvard, where the star system has long been in place, junior professors are rarely promoted to tenure” (p. 88). So, the irony is that undergraduate education at elite schools is largely conducted by graduate assistants and adjunct faculty, while much of the instructional budget is squandered on buying the prestige associated with academic stars who infrequently teach and whose productive careers are all but over. Far beneath the level of the stars, “adjuncts recruited on a fee-for-service basis are the academic equivalent of temp agency fill-ins or day laborers” (p. 114). Kirp reports that the University of Chicago has the lowest ratio of students to faculty of any major university with “1,125 faculty members and 8,200 students.” This allows “the typical Chicago professor” to teach “just thirty students a year” (p. 43). Although debates about standards, curricula, and prestige continue at Chicago, Kirp says that Hugo Sonnenschein may someday be recognized as “the leader who saved an institution by dragging it into modern times” (p. 51). Something of a red herring, Kirp uses the case of the University of Chicago to suggest that some consideration of market values and forces is a necessity and the intransigence of intellectuals who refuse to consider financial viability is simply petulant. Shifting to NYU, Kirp writes, “These two stories, the hiring of superstars and the demand for unionization among the teaching underclass, are intertwined” because while the stars make $150,000 or more per year for lending their names to the school (p. 68), part-timers “teach 70 percent of the undergraduate classes” (p. 69) for about $3,000 per course (p. 114) with “no job security (courses are sometimes canceled at the beginning of a semester), no offices [. . .] no benefits, no health insurance, and no voice in university affairs” (p. 86). Kirp says this is why teaching assistants “resorted to a labor-management model, rejecting as irrelevant to their lives the idea of the university as a community of scholars” (p. 69). If so, they are now going to have to reconsider that notion. In 2000 the National Labor Relations Board ruled that NYU graduate teaching assistants could form a labor union for the purpose of collective bargaining, a decision that fueled the hopes of graduate teaching assistants at many East Coast private schools (see my review of Steal This University (http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev280.htm). Recently (13 July 04), by a three to two decision, the Board reversed its position, agreeing with argument of the schools that “graduate student assistants, [. . .] are primarily students and have primarily an educational, not economic, relationship with their university” and hence cannot form or join labor unions to collectively bargain for better working conditions (http://www.nlrb.gov/nlrb/press/releases/r2533.htm). John Sexton, the President of NYU (http://www.nyu.edu/transition.team/sextonpr.html), further divided his faculty into blue and gray teams. “The blue team, he said, was made up of professors who could get jobs at the drop of a hat at any of the top five universities in the country; the gray team represented the rest of the faculty” (p. 85). Faculty at every level are unlikely to have a sense of belonging to a community of scholars in such a market driven atmosphere. “If the university is meant to be an academic community, not just a [commercial] firm, then teaching, learning, and research have to remain the responsibility of its members” (p. 113) rather than be outsourced to adjuncts who, in every other way but teaching, are allowed no stake in the university. Revenue Center Management (RCM) “At USC, the introduction of revenue center management unleashed the academic equivalent of a Hobbesian war of all against all” (p. 118). This model considers the university to be something like a shopping mall where each shop, or academic department, runs its own business and balances its own books. Each department or “unit is expected to be a profit center” and is taxed by the central administration (p. 115). At USC the competition among departments caused the engineering department to teach English courses to its majors and the English department to advertise courses like “Shakespeare Lite,” which promised that students wouldn’t have to read a word of Shakespeare but could simply watch a series of movies for a guaranteed high grade. “In one instance, an engineer started a scuba diving course to earn tuition revenues for his school” (p. 119). After a few years of this and with the resulting decline of USC’s prestige, a new president, Steven Sample, “sought to rein in the budgeting system—no easy task, since the existing formula greatly benefited law and engineering, two units with powerful allies among the USC trustees” (p. 121). After considering the failure of similar RCM methods at the University of Michigan, Kirp makes the point that the admonition to leave regulation of the university to the invisible hand of the capitalist market “is itself a political statement” or policy choice that Kirp identifies as “a default of institutional leadership and an abandonment of the idea of university’s mission” (p. 129). He quotes Paul Courant, an Associate Provost at Michigan who after studying the budgeting process cautioned that “The university isn’t a real market.” Meanwhile, the Provost at Michigan concluded that the revenue center management technique “exaggerates the importance of financial self-sufficiency while downplaying the commitment to collaboration and, most broadly, to the shared life of the institution, the very things that make Michigan [or any university] a special place” (p. 128). Kirp says, “To think about a university entirely as a market is to reject the claim that the central administration should determine priorities for the institution as a whole” (p. 127) and offers the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia as an example of how one part of the university sought to go it alone. Their decision was forced by that fact that “nationwide between 1980 and 2000, the share of universities’ operating expenses paid for by state tax dollars was cut by 30 percent” (pp. 131-2) even though enrollment increased. In Virginia, university presidents finally announced an ultimatum: if the state “didn’t do a better job of funding higher education, some parts of the universities would go private” (p. 134). The leaders in this movement would predictably be the law and business schools, which “could attract enough students willing to pay the market rate tuition that self-sufficiency would require.” Kirp identifies some of the results of this tactic, which stem from the notion that the customers’ money defines the desirable product. Consequently, “the donors’ preferences, not the public interest, increasingly define the instituions’ priorities” (p. 132). Darden chased cash by offering custom classes to Fortune 500 companies willing to pay “as much as $1,000 a day for lodging and classes” for each student (p. 138). The rub here is that business clients view the research and curricula, which they have paid for, as their proprietary property. This “turns Darden itself into a kind of consulting firm” (p. 140). Kirp says: In teaching company-specific material to corporate managers, Darden is no different from Dell—with the crucial exception that as a nonprofit institution it is exempt from taxes, and that as part of the University of Virginia it carries Thomas Jefferson’s ‘brand’ (p. 140). Kirp describes a more ad hoc and temporary business arrangement made between the Swiss biotech company Novartis (http://www.novartis.com/) and UC–Berkeley, which brought the school $25 million (http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/98legacy/11-23-1998.html). Novartis “required faculty who were working with its databases to sign confidentiality agreements” (p. 217). The problem is “Companies typically make money by keeping secrets, while university-generated science has historically been available to all” (p. 215). Thus, the situation at Darden, if not at Berkeley, “represents the triumph of the private over the public good” (p. 143). Distance Education Kirp relates Columbia University’s $40 million venture into online education with the development of its Fathom portal that involves “a consortium of fourteen leading U.S. and British universities, libraries, and museums” (http://www.fathom.com). It is a strange amalgamation of institutions ranging from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to the London School of Economics to the American Film Institute and the New York City Public Library. Begun with “an initial $20 million” investment, the project “received another $20 million infusion” in 2001 (pp. 173-4). “In its thirty-month history” as a for-profit venture, Fathom “generated just $700,000 in revenues, including contributions from it partner organizations.” By 2003, “Columbia decided to shut down Fathom” (p. 175) as a for-profit enterprise and to save something of the immense investment by emphasizing Fathom’s function as a portal, making it a kind of academic public service project (http://www.college.columbia.edu/cct/feb01/feb01_feature_digital3.html). By doing this, Columbia followed MIT’s marketing plan to make Web resources available as “free samples to entice customers” and, of course, to build prestige by advertising what they offer (http://pdc.cvc.edu/common/newsdetail.asp?IDX=595). MIT hoped that their “OpenCourseWare would attract favorable press; it would cast MIT as a leader in the Internet field” (p. 181). The OpenCourseWare project freely disseminates Web course components. MIT’s advertising of its magnanimous gesture makes it seem like it is offering free polio vaccine or free money to the world or, at the very least, opening its doors to the entire world to invite everyone to share the classes that MIT offers (http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/ocw.html). In the areas that I know something about (writing and literature), I found little of value at MIT’s OpenCourseWare site (http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html). I am not the only one disappointed by the paucity of substantial material (http://www.xplanazine.com/archives/2003/11/mit_opencoursew.php). The Fathom site offers some interesting samples, but it too much resembles the Internet itself in offering bits and pieces instead of serving as a portal to reach substantive educational and research sources. Neither site illustrates or explains how producing “a sophisticated Internet course” can cost a million dollars. Incredibly Kirp says, “Open University courses [. . .] cost three times as much, and course development isn’t the main expense” (p. 183). Kirps judgment and advocacy are perhaps most apparent in his chapter on the failure of Britain’s Open University (OU) to transplant its undergraduate programs to America. For example, he asks: If no one will underwrite an enterprise like Open University, with its promise of a world-class education for virtually everyone, will the on-line higher education world be ruled by the likes of Thomson and the Apollo Group? (p. 203) The Apollo Group includes the for-profit University of Phoenix. Kirp laments that “various e-learning ventures, all point to the same conclusion: in this high stakes world, money, not quality, talks the loudest” (p. 202). It is interesting that Kirp does not summon comparable ire to castigate elite private universities that play exactly the same money and prestige games. As someone involved in online education, I do not accept Kirps judgment about OU. He makes two interrelated points: that money spent for marketing and advertising drive out quality programs and the failure of OU in America illustrates the problem. How much money is needed to develop and promote distance education? NYU wasted up to $25 million in a short-lived online venture that produced fewer than ten courses. Cornell squandered $36 million on its failed online program (see my review of Gene Maeroff’s A Classroom of One (http://edrev.asu.edu/reviews/rev251.htm). Kirp reports that Columbia invested $40 million in Fathom and that the “Open University spent $20 million on its American operation” (p. 201), which already had courseware that only needed to be adapted for the tastes of American students. Kirp suggests the level of money required is illustrated by Cardean University (http://www.cardean.edu/cgi-bin/cardean1/view/about_storyCardean.jsp?visitor=guest). Since it began offering classes in 2000, “the for-profit business school sponsored by several leading American universities” including Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, and the London School of Economics, “had burned through an estimated $125 million by the end of 2002. The Apollo Group, which runs the on-line University of Phoenix courses, annually spends more than $20 million on marketing alone” (pp. 201-2). How is this money spent? The tales of $1-3 million dollars spent on developing a course are hardly indicative of the thousands of online courses developed by hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities. Six institutions involved in a Sloan Foundation study, including the University of Maryland and Penn State—two leaders in distance education—report that course development costs “between $5,000 and $15,000.” In spending a $1 million to develop an online MBA degree program, the University of Maryland spent 10 percent of its money in course development, 15 percent in marketing, and 31 percent in faculty salaries (http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i23/23a04101.htm). Kirp suggests where all the money is spent at Phoenix and Cardean, in advertising and marketing, not in developing better educational resources. I suspect that is also where the money was squandered at Columbia, Cornell, and NYU. Britain’s Open University The comparison between the Open University and Cardean offers apples and oranges. Cardean and Phoenix offer graduate business programs to people already involved in business careers. OU primarily offers undergraduate education (http://www.open.ac.uk/). Kirp says the failure of the Open University in America “was simple economics” (p. 185). He bitterly comments that “with so much attention focused on high-tech and quick killings, little notice was paid to offering something of value” (p. 186). This implies that American distance education offers nothing comparable to the glories of OU. For whatever reason, Kirp carries a torch for OU. Unlike Britain in the 1970s, there are ample opportunities in America for high school graduates to begin higher education, including easy entry to thousands of community colleges. Consider the context of American continuing education that Derek Bok sketches in his Universities in the Marketplace (2003), saying, “Already, more than 75 million adults receive some form of continuing education every year; the money spent annually on developing vocational skills alone amounts to more than $40 billion” (p. 90). In Britain the Open University met a long-standing need for higher education among those who could not quality for entrance at the traditional universities and had no alternatives. In contrast, when it came to America, OU had to compete with community colleges and many other education providers offering well developed and culturally familiar programs. Kirp laments that “in the insular world of American higher education, unless the school is Oxford or Cambridge, a reputation earned abroad means almost nothing” (p. 200). Perhaps that is because America has a fully developed higher education system. One can make the same point about “insular” Japan where an American degree, unless it is from the Ivy League, means little. Kirp waves off the complaint that OU courseware was culturally foreign—“too much Queen and cricket.’” Having listened to hours of BBC radio when I taught in Cyprus, I recognize the problem. The longer I listened the more foreign Britain became. Kirp says “OU tried to rectify the problem” (p. 198), but why? What sense does it make for OU to attempt to make its curricula over into a semblance of what can be found in American schools? What is the point, if there is no discernable market, other than chasing money? Does Kirp really believe that OU offered an educational opportunity so clearly superior to that offered by American schools? Finally, Kirp recognizes that in Britain OU fostered a close-knit community of those who had been excluded from higher education. We can understand that in the first few classes this was an exciting and engrossing experience likely to foster a sense of camaraderie comparable to that of pioneers or explorers. “Yet in the United States, the realities of geography made it impossible to recreate that [essentially suburban] system; instead, advising, counseling, and grading were done on-line” without the friendly human contact and without any sense of doing something new and revolutionary (p. 199). Kirp implies that it is only us crass Americans who fail to appreciate the Queen’s English, but the OU Website acknowledges that “about 26,000 learners are studying OU courses outside the UK” (http://www.open.ac.uk/about/). That is not a very impressive figure. The University of Maryland’s University College (overseas division) enrolls more students with a history going back to 1947 (http://www.umsa.umd.edu/Institutions/Profiles/UMUniversity.html). Apparently one size and one view of education do not fit the world. In any case, recounting the failure of OU in America flushes Kirp from cover where he sought to offer only the facts. He now says, “Higher education has become more a marketplace than a meritocracy. Aside from quality, other things matter: gaining name recognition, which costs money” (p. 197). He complains that “OU had created ‘something of great benefit,’ the best of what distance learning can offer,” only to find that “the Internet has become a shopping mall and a porn shop, higher education on the Web may be destined to be driven not by academic virtue but by the bottom line” (p. 202). Kirp’s Tory ire over the failure of OU in America makes him pessimistic about the prospects for distance education. He concludes, “there are no realistic prospects for a twenty-first-century counterpart to the 1862 Land Grant Act, no e-learing version of the GI Bill or the Pell grant program that would make universally available the best that distance learning has to offer” (p. 203). Best in what sense? The best defined in the elite research contexts of Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, and Oxford completely misses the point and value of distance education, which is typically addressed to those who could never reach elite standards and are not destined for elite careers. The OU Website boasts that “Over a third of people starting these courses have qualifications below conventional university entry requirements” (http://www.open.ac.uk/about/). The best that distance education is likely to offer is found in the “secret weapon” of the tutors, facilitators, and teachers (p. 193). In his lament for OU Kirp acknowledges that “the network of personal relationships between students and their tutors may matter as much as the thick packet of readings and video and audio cassettes that students receive” (p. 192). As someone who now only teaches online courses, I concur that online education—in contrast to information delivery—is likely to be only as good as the amount of time, interest, experience, and dedication of the instructor. And American education does not need to learn this lesson from Britain’s Open University. IT (Information Technology) Kirp notices that “training programs for high-tech jobs have expanded into nothing less than a ‘parallel postsecondary universe.’” He says that “By 2003, these courses had enrolled more than 2 million students” in the U.S. Many courses of study are designed to prepare students to pass Cisco or Microsoft exams, which lead to well paying jobs. Kirp describes Heald College (http://www.heald.edu/corporate/about_heald.asp), a California nonprofit business school that charges as much as $6,200 for a twenty week program designed to help students pass the Cisco exams. Students can find such preparatory courses at nearly every community college, but they come to schools like Heald College for intense and quick programs that promise 70 to 80 percent pass rates (p. 226). Kirp explains that schools like UC Santa Cruz hope to compete for the same students, but cannot do so. As with the correspondence course fad, elite universities will not accept their own extension credits for what it considers training programs. In explaining Columbia’s Fathom venture, Kirp says that the “potential customers want something the university isn’t prepared to give them, namely, a course of study that leads to a Columbia degree” (p. 175). The same thing occurs when UC schools try to compete with schools like Heald College: they want “to have it both ways—to recruit students by taking advantage of its good [prestigious] name while denying any responsibility for the content of courses that carry its name.” Typically taught by adjuncts, the courses cannot be applied towards earning a degree. So, what is the difference between a Cisco certificate gained by preparation from Heald College or UC Santa Cruz? One difference is that the preparatory coursework is central to the mission of Heald College and only a distant peripheral concern at UC Santa Cruz. DeVry Perhaps because so much has been written about the University of Phoenix, Kirp examines DeVry (http://www.devry.com/). A DeVry bachelor of science degree is not cheap, costing “between $35,000 and $40,000, depending on the major.” Nonetheless, “DeVry ranks second in enrollment only to the University of Phoenix, with more than 50,000 students at twenty-five campuses” (p. 242). Kirp makes it clear that DeVry promises jobs, or a career, more than an education. Typically, the DeVry Fremont (San Francisco) Website has nothing to say about its faculty. Kirp interviews students who say, “Placement is the best—everything’s focused on career.” He says they “appreciate the fact that—unlike in ‘regular college,’ where instructors are remote—their professors are mentors who ‘want you to succeed” (p. 246). This customer service attitude is learned. The Fremont “campus dean Kandy Simmons calls” her faculty “weak links” and “fixes” them “one way or another, in a ‘total quality management’ environment” (p. 243). Policy decisions on curricula and every other matter are made in the Chicago central office. Faculty follow orders, “like it or not.” So much for the notions of academic freedom and discussion of ideas. The DeVry model of for-profit “education,” if it can be called that, allows Kirp to sum up his thoughts on the marketing of higher education. He says, “Implicit in much of the criticism of for-profit schools is the belief that a real university should traffic in ideas rather than know-how” (p. 252). Although for-profit training schools “have no commitment to the idea of public service, no sense of their mission as tied to the good of the commonwealth” (p. 253), Kirp recognizes that traditional universities have little choice but to accept, at least in part, an entrepreneurial dimension. He suggests the model of Motorola University (http://www.motorola.com/motorolauniversity/). From its Website you might suspect that it is located in Chicago instead of Phoenix where it “is situated at Arizona State University’s ‘research park’” (http://www.asu.edu/researchpark/motorola_university.html). Motorola gave ASU at least $11 million to develop this partnership (http://www.gd-decisionsystems.com/press1997/100611millionasu.html). It is no surprise that near the end of his study Kirp suggests the likelihood of “Convergence along these lines, rather than the demise of the public university” as “the likeliest scenario” for the future of American higher education (p. 252). Kirp ends by saying what we would expect a professor to say, but perhaps more mildly than we would expect: “universities should be places for discovering, sharing, and passing on knowledge rather than” seeking to become “companies for hoarding and selling it.” He reminds us that “Maintaining communities of scholars is not a concern of the market” (p. 261). The dilemma for higher education is wedded to the very success of the American university. The community of scholars tradition has existed so long that we take it for granted and ignore the infrastructure and cost of fostering and sustaining such communities unless they are focused on research or commercial ventures. This leads Kirp to propose that “The ultimate question is this: Can the public be persuaded that universities represent something as ineffable as the common good [. . .]? Can the argument convincingly be made that the university offers something of such great value that it is worth subsidizing even in the teeth of bottom-line pressures” so that Americans believe, “as NYU’s John Sexton says, in certain spheres ‘money is not the coin of the realm’”? (p. 263). Perhaps Kirp’s detached rather than militant tone at the end provides evidence of his knowledge that in the contemporary climate of American values, the enthusiasm off-campus, as well as in some areas on-campus (such as in the business and engineering colleges and in other disciplines that see entrepreneurial endeavors as an extension or application of their interests and methods) is for the opposite model; an enthusiasm for money that renders the new university an appendage and instrument of business. About the Reviewer John Rothfork English Department Northern Arizona University Flagstaff, AZ 86011 John.Rothfork@nau.edu John Rothfork teaches online courses in a graduate certificate program in professional and technical writing at Northern Arizona University. His Website is at http://oak.ucc.nau.edu/jgr6/. ~ ER home | Reseņas Educativas | Resenhas Educativas ~ ~ overview | reviews | editors | volunteer | submit | guidelines | announcements ~