Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right? In this
book, one of America's leading educators cautions that the answer is all
too often "yes." Taking the first comprehensive look at the growing
commercialization of our academic institutions, Derek Bok probes the
efforts on campus to profit financially not only from athletics but
increasingly, from education and research as well. He shows how such
ventures are undermining core academic values and what universities can
do to limit the damage.
Commercialization has many causes, but it could never have grown to its
present state had it not been for the recent, rapid growth of
money-making opportunities in a more technologically complex,
knowledge-based economy. A brave new world has now emerged in which
university presidents, enterprising professors, and even administrative
staff can all find seductive opportunities to turn specialized knowledge
into profit.
Bok argues that universities, faced with these temptations, are
jeopardizing their fundamental mission in their eagerness to make money
by agreeing to more and more compromises with basic academic values. He
discusses the dangers posed by increased secrecy in corporate-funded
research, for-profit Internet companies funded by venture capitalists,
industry-subsidized educational programs for physicians, conflicts of
interest in research on human subjects, and other questionable
activities.
While entrepreneurial universities may occasionally succeed in the short
term, reasons Bok, only those institutions that vigorously uphold
academic values, even at the cost of a few lucrative ventures, will win
public trust and retain the respect of faculty and students. Candid,
evenhanded, and eminently readable, Universities in the Marketplace will
be widely debated by all those concerned with the future of higher
education in America and beyond.
