Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education

How can you turn an English department into a revenue centre? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, this book takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today - the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success. Author David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philiosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry Univerity. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic superstars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting. Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market - but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?