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The university for sale.

Article Excerpt
DEREK Bok, the former president of Harvard, who in the dozen years since he left the presidency has written five important books on major issues affecting the nation and higher education, has now turned his attention toward a peculiarly difficult and challenging problem. In Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, [dagger] Bok considers "the efforts to sell the work of universities for a profit." He does not have in mind the new and controversial institutions in higher education launched by profit-seeking entrepreneurs. His concern is rather the efforts of traditional public and private institutions of higher education to draw in more revenue by adopting to a greater degree the practices of the marketplace. This, as Bok writes, is not new--universities, after all, have tried to promote and market their advantages to tuition-paying students for a century or more. But he believes these modest efforts at advertising and promotion have expanded enormously in the last several decades, and raise serious questions as to how they affect the central work of the universities.

Efforts to market universities, if limited to honest accounts of the educational programs they have to offer, would ordinarily raise no eyebrows. But matters have gone considerably beyond this for two reasons. First, there are the new opportunities for huge profits--for commercial companies, certainly, for universities possibly--opened by the enormous advances in the sciences and particularly in human biology. Second, the free-market, profit-oriented model has greatly risen in prestige. Bok refers to the "growing influence of the market throughout our society. Commercialization has plainly taken root, not only in higher education, but also in many other areas of American life and culture: health care, museums, public schools, even religion." Yet in each of these some central objective, not easily encompassed by the cost and benefit calculus of the marketplace, is at stake.

TO emphasize what is at stake, Bok tells the story of an imaginary dream he presented in his 1988 Harvard commencement address. In this dream, he spoke with a prosperous Harvard alumnus in the financial world who sensibly proposed a $2 billion loan to assist with the...