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

SHAKESPEARE, EINSTEIN, AND THE BOTTOM LINE: THE MARKETING OF HIGHER EDUCATION 

By David Kirp. Harvard University Press, 2004

"For better or worse--for better and worse, really--American higher education is being transformed by both the power and the ethic of the marketplace." So David Kirp summarizes the issue examined in his enthralling multi-case critique of the role of money in U.S. higher education. And, it is the "worse" results of the marketing of higher learning that receive nearly all of the attention in this book's numerous and elegantly written narratives. Ultimately for Kirp, it is the demise of academe's stewardship of the public good that marks the transformation he chronicles. Certainly, this is not the first or only book to confront the commercialization of the academy and uncover its threats to the common good, but it offers several strengths that set it apart from the mounting number of related works and make it a very good choice for use in the classrooms of various undergraduate college levels, or as a reference book on the horrors of the market ethic on campus. Readers will soon see, however, that the book's effectiveness owes to its descriptive rather than analytical powers of the narratives.

Kirp's stint as acting dean of Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy inspired the book The trigger event, he implies, was his meeting with the Council of the Deans wherein the academic administrators spent forty-five minutes discussing the correct and incorrect use of the school's mascot. As I did countless times in each chapter, educators of all ranks and across the range of academic work settings will undoubtedly draw comparisons to their personal circumstances. Given this book's breadth, there is something in it for nearly everyone.

The features distinguishing the book from others in this field include its fine writing, the many different forms of marketing encroachments studied, and the diversity of colleges and universities inviting or forced to accept the market ethic. Moreover, all positions within academe's organization, from trustees to faculty, are exposed for their embrace or surrender to the market; even students, for they--the ones from wealthy families, that is--bypass their assigned guidance counselors and hire very expensive private consultants from companies like Ivywise to turn their unremarkable resumes into admissions passes.

The good story telling is aided by the interviews Kirp and his graduate student assistants conducted with faculty, administrators, students and trustees for each chapter. The colleges and universities examined are big in number (sixteen) and diverse in type. While most attention is given to the prestigious and private institutions, Kirp includes research universities, traditional liberal arts colleges, for-profits, distance learning schools, and law schools. The book's accounts include techniques for recruiting star students, such as curriculum changes, more fun on campus, and admissions schemes; recruitment of star faculty; financial accountability; academic privatization and outsourcing; and Internet instruction as well as university-industry partnerships. Thus, given its breadth and prose, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottam Line will prove effective for various courses in sociology and organizational studies as well as education.

It also offers practical uses. For college-bound seniors and first-year college students, the beginning chapters expose many of the academy's enrollment-boosting ploys. "Enrollment managers" are more likely to accept early-admissions candidates, but these students' financial aid package will be smaller than those who wait. This is because less financial aid to early-admissions students, whose enrollment is a certainty if admitted, allows the schools to use more money to woo the academically stronger but undecided candidates. As the case at Dickinson College demonstrates, the aid is less distributed on the basis of need, and inequality results: Dickinson brought in more students from richer families while the percentage of first-generation college freshmen dropped by almost one-half from 1999 to 2002. In another tactic, Princeton went so far as to hack into Yale's computers to compete for their A-list of candidates, including George W. Bush's niece. Enrollment managers engage in this competition over star students to improve the market position of the school: the high-caliber students attract other highly-valued students, which helps lure acclaimed professors, which then helps increase alumni donations, and ultimately the school climbs higher in the U.S. News and World Report's "America's Best Colleges" survey. New York University, Boston University, Harvard and Colby College are some of the schools that knowingly inflated their students' SAT scores for that journal. In another method of gaining high ratings, Emory University and Franklin and Marshall deny their very best applicants who the enrollment managers believe will not enroll if admitted, thus building their image as highly selective.

Academic decision makers apply as much or more gusto to recruit renowned faculty, as is demonstrated in the case of New York University's departments of politics and philosophy. "They decided to spend their way into high society," as one of Kirp's informants put it. While these departments soared into the top tier, relations strained between the stars and the mediocre--what New York University president, John Sexton, labeled respectively as the "blue team" and the "gray team;" he explicitly called for the proportion of the former to increase from 10% to 30% of the faculty. Lighter teaching loads offered to blue-team faculty, of course, result in smaller amounts of time with students. The hiring process, moreover, omitted faculty input, and when they complained, the trustee chairman dismissed them saying, "We fully understand the faculty point of view, and we reject it." This is one of the factors behind New York University's faculty drive to revive its AAUP chapter. Beyond this, however, Kirp provides no focus on the effects of commercialization on university governance. But we do learn that schools like the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan were able to end or reduce the increasingly common accountability model of operations known as "revenue center management." In this model, each academic unit in the university must carry its weight financially; each is a separate profit center. It assumes "the citizens of a university are members of a company whose chief mission is to maximize dollar profits ..." Consequently, the departments enter into a war of all against all, and the institution's collective commitment to the public good is weakened. Accompanying "revenue center management" are the academy's versions of privatization, outsourcing and cost-cutting. At the University of Virginia, for instance, even the library sought to privatize and become financially independent of, and thus no longer paying service fees to, the University. And, New York Law School used the unheard of cost-cutting tactic of collecting fees at its legal clinic. Law cases were thus selected for the money they might draw, not the educational needs of the students or the legal needs of the poor.

While powerful in its story-telling and convincing in its elegant critique of the raw power money exerts over higher education, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line proves weak in three main ways. First and foremost is its lack of explanation. "Intensified competitive pressures" is the term Kirp frequently employs as the source of the transformation of our colleges and universities, but the people and the relationships that actually create this competition are made absent by such sweeping statements. It becomes an unquestioned reality that all reasonable educators must accept. He does offer a list of factors behind the marketing of higher education, including a new generation of students with desires for the "practical arts," a new breed of rivals that live or die by the market, new educational technology (e.g., online courses), and incessant demand for more funds and new revenue sources to replace ever-shrinking public support. But these are symptoms and imperatives of unexamined causes, and they do not explain why higher learning sees entrepreneurial ambition as a virtue. If we focus on the reality that schools face competitive pressures for more students and new sources of money, this restricts our scope to what the schools are required to do and renders unnecessary the study of why public funds have been cut in the first place. And, if there is a new generation of students with different desires, then under what new social conditions are these desires changing? And, why should colleges and universities accommodate rather than challenge or, at the very least, question these new desires? For, if higher education's common good that Kirp so strongly supports has as its fundamental value the development of critical thinking, why do not academics put this value into practice in the classroom? The objective conditions of academic labor that inhibit such activity, and the wider political economy shaping these conditions, are not examined.

A second shortcoming of the book is its inability to give a cogent account of the claimed positive results of the new higher education. In the case of new education technology, Kirp rejects David Nobel's critique of Internet-based instruction as "Marxist melodrama" because rather than being the victims of a technology imposed from above, it is the faculty (in the Associated Colleges of the South) who are "the champions of the venture." And, in the case of Berkeley's collaboration with Silicon Valley firms and the federal government--Gigascale, the attempt to put one billion transistors on a single chip--Kirp claims that, "Despite all the attention paid to the financial aspects of these deals, what's most interesting about the Gigascale Center isn't who pays the bills but the high-voltage community of learning, an academic commons for the twenty-first century, that has been created." In each case, however, it is not clear if the faculty is really in control. Are they conceiving ideas of their own making, driven by the pursuit of scientific truths in the spirit of critical and creative inquiry and performed in cooperative relations between colleagues, or is the market ethic driving it all?

Finally, the book offers no guidelines for what to do, aside from the hope that faculty and "institutions that call themselves colleges and universities" will reaffirm and promote the higher values of liberal education. Faculty takes these values as self-evident, yet they must explain them anew to a new audience of career-minded undergraduates. The mission of the academicians, he says, is to "... reinvent the academic commons--to reinvigorate the culture of the academy, to find persuasive ways to explaining to a new generation the enduring values of a liberal education." And perhaps, if we accept this victim-blaming for a moment, there is some possibility inside the academy. For, as long as the market-driven university continues to value the development of students' capacity to think critically and creatively, faculty have the chance to nurture these very values of the academy against its own embrace of the market. What we would not accept, though, is Kirp's suggestion (that one assumes he now regrets) for who could be the prophets of reaffirming the value of the academic commons, namely New York University President John Sexton, who Kirp claims "may well become a great institutional leader at NYU." As we now know, this is the same John Sexton who is aggressively busting the graduate student union at this institution.

All italics refer to the original emphases of the author.