Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education

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.

Author: Derek Bok
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 12/05/2004
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.12w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9780691120126


Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 03/24/2005 pg. 19

About the Author
Derek Bok is the 300th Anniversary University Professor and Faculty Chair of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University. He was formerly President of Harvard University and Dean of the Harvard Law School. His numerous books include The Shape of the River (Princeton, 1998, with William G. Bowen) and The Trouble with Government (Harvard, 2001).