Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education

Reviewed by Susanne Lohmann

Derek Bok. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003

In Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education, Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University and a former dean of Harvard Law School, is critical of recent developments in the research enterprise. The faculty, especially in medicine and the life sciences, are patenting and licensing publicly funded scientific discoveries and founding firms to exploit the commercial potential of their research. Universities are supporting these entrepreneurial faculty and sharing in the profits. Commercialization, Bok believes, leads to secrecy and conflicts of interest. It jeopardizes the academic mission and compromises academic values.

Bok's concerns are well founded. The purpose of the research university is to support the specialized and creative inquiry of individuals; the collective vetting, pooling, and accumulation of research results; and the sharing of research results on a global information commons. The profit motive fundamentally threatens the integrity of the university because it interferes with the processes by which research results are created, validated, and spread. A single university cannot unilaterally opt out of privatizing the information commons, or it will lose its scientists to other universities. The scientific community must self-regulate, and Bok's admonitions contribute to an urgently needed conversation.

Bok is also critical of recent developments in the teaching enterprise, especially the trends toward for-profit, online, and continuing education. In Bok's world, and this is the world he wishes to preserve, the faculty decide on matters of teaching and the curriculum, with the goal of meeting the needs of students and society. The profit motive undermines this noble goal because it shifts the focus away from providing the best learning experience and toward raising prices and cutting costs. Since students cannot readily compare the quality of different programs of study, they use institutional reputation as a proxy for quality. Universities can thus exploit their reputations and make money by cheapening the educational enterprise. Bok calls on universities to reverse this trend or to risk losing the trust and respect of the public.

Bok's concerns are out of touch with the world in which state universities operate. In this world, institutions are engaged in an expensive competition called star wars. The goal is to attract the best faculty, or the famous and the flashy, and thereby improve institutional rankings. The race for rankings has an Alice-in-Wonderland quality about it: everybody is running as fast as they can to stay in the same place—and they spend an awful lot of resources to achieve this stagnant outcome. The faculty at a research university easily see what counts and what doesn't, and they focus on research at the expense of teaching. In this world, it is not the profit motive but the race for rankings and the resulting emphasis on research that is driving up college costs even as it leads to a deterioration in the quality of teaching.

Bok is concerned that the commercialization of the university will create a two-tier faculty—those who go commercial and those who remain pure, with corresponding income differences. He asks what this will do to the collegiality of the faculty. The brutal fact is that leading universities already have a two-tier faculty, except that the cleavage runs in a direction different from the one predicted by Bok. Universities are overproducing PhD graduates and hiring them back as cheap teaching labor. This proletariat is bitter and resentful, for its members are denied the salaries, health benefits, and job security of regular faculty. Their exclusion from faculty governance defines their second-class status.

Bok writes from the vantage point of Harvard, an institution with an enormous endowment, and his privileged position creates blind spots of the "let them eat cake" variety. The costly labor-intensive education he has in mind is not a prescription for mass education. Nobody is going to subsidize millions, or even tens of millions, of students to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars per student per year. State universities exist in a different world. As states cut university budgets, their institutions of higher education struggle to find a way to lower their costs. Currently, they operate in cottage industry mode: each professor makes up his or her own syllabus and teaches it to a class. To lower costs, there is no alternative to moving into an industrial mode: basic instruction and large classes need to go online, and online classes must be developed by teams allowing for specialization, division of labor, diversity of perspectives, and economies of scale.

The move to a factory operation will necessarily reduce professorial power over class content and curriculum. Contrary to what Bok suggests, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Research-active faculty are mostly interested in the narrow and esoteric questions their disciplines define as interesting. Students are interested in holistic and interdisciplinary instruction. A course development team that cuts across disciplines and mixes theoretical and applied expertise is likely to produce a course that combines high quality and student appeal, which is not standard fare for courses produced by individual professors.

Online classes will never be able to compete with a Harvard class with fifteen students that is taught by a charismatic research professor (if indeed such a class exists at Harvard). But in the long run, once the educational content and design issues of online education have been worked out, it will certainly be an improvement compared to the experience of a state university student who now, along with five hundred of his closest friends, suffers through Econ 101 taught by a distraught freeway flier.

Most likely the move to an industrial mode—developing courses in teams, going online—will end up improving the quality of the teaching in state universities. Likely or not, good or bad, there is no alternative.

Susanne Lohmann is professor of political science and policy studies and director of the Center for Governance at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is completing a book titled How Universities Think.

 Printer-Friendly Page