Technology, markets, and the new political economy of higher education. (Featured Topic).

(Adapted from presentations at AAC&U's Annual Meeting in January 2001.)

* Sheila Slaughter

Our 1997 book, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the Entrepreneurial University, led us to begin thinking about technology, markets, and the new political economy of higher education. There's little research in this area. Nearly all the research that looks at technology and work considers private commercial enterprises ranging from manufacturing and industrial concerns to diverse financial and information services. In large part, there is a dearth of research on higher education because the bulk of courses offered with the new technology by nonprofit and for-profit institutions of higher education have developed within the last five years, with the majority appearing in the last three years.

Most studies that deal with higher education from the 1990s onward describe Internet distance education or compare educational effectiveness between conventional and Internet classrooms. Often, this research is badly designed and lacks theoretical or conceptual frameworks. It does not deal with how faculty labor is organized, with curricular products for academic e-commerce, nor with the ethics and values issues raised by on-line education.

At the University of Arizona, my research group is planning a study that will look at how e-commerce interacts with e-pedagogy. Because it's in process, I can't share the results with you, but I will share some of our working hypotheses, which are based on extensive review of interdisciplinary literature dealing with organization of academic work, distance education, and markets. I think it's particularly important to look at these things, because venture capitalists are starting to look to higher education, teaching, and learning, in the same way that they identified the profit potential of the health care industry in the 1980s.

Marketizing higher education

Venture capitalists and for-profits are primarily interested in higher education because it organizes markets for whatever e-products they want to sell. Colleges and universities are interested for the same reasons: They hope that e-education will provide profit centers for the institution. At the same time that institutions are contemplating increased engagement in e-education, faculty and a wide variety of academic professionals are looking to carve out niches and profits for themselves with regard to Internet learning. So, if we are thinking about distance education, courseware, and software, for-profits, institutions, administrators, and faculty all are interested in getting a piece of the action.

Colleges and universities began to grapple with these issues in the 1970s and 1980s around professional development, which, at that point, took place via television and tapes. The Internet makes it more exciting, more viable. Through professional education in engineering, medicine, nursing, law, and other fields close to the market, universities employed non-academics to develop work-for-hire programs owned by universities and serving as profit centers. This paved the way for universities and other types of professionals--professionals who were not faculty--to become involved in Internet education for profit or as a profit center.

The introduction of venture capital and the creation of for-profit education almost always depends on universities forming partnerships with private corporations. In other words, it is rare for private corporations to act on their own. There are, of course, exceptions like the University of Phoenix. But, for example, Columbia University and the University of Chicago have associated with UNext.com, a relationship that is further complicated because UNext's head is a trustee of the University of Chicago.

What we want to know about the Internet and the World Wide Web is whether they are hastening the marketizing of higher education. By marketizing we mean organizing faculty work, developing curricular products, and targeting student populations so as to incorporate market values into educational activities and generate new revenue streams for institutions via for-profit educational enterprises. We think that this might be less a conscious choice than an unconscious adaptation of the ethics and values of the private sector economy. Because adaptation of market values may be embedded in e-education, we think we must foreground and discuss e-ethics and values.

Professional Labor

Our research group has three sets of questions or working hypotheses. The first of these is about the organization of professional labor. Our working hypothesis in this regard is that faculty work will be reorganized so that faculty are incorporated in groups of "managed professionals," as my colleague Gary Rhoades calls them, in matrix organizations of production, in which administrators--often academic professionals--not connected to the field of specialization have increased authority. An example would be training courses requested by corporations that are organized by administrators and that faculty develop in cooperation with corporate staff.

A second hypothesis is that there will be more part-time faculty, graduate students, and other professionals--many of whom are women--who will support a small number of academic "stars" who offer popular and profitable distance-education courses. Those stars--largely male--will be the full-timers. The matrix work teams that produce online programs and generate high tuition will be relatively isolated from the department faculty. The lead, tenure-track faculty will receive greater rewards and will interact regularly with top administrators in departments, colleges, and universities, receiving favorable treatment with regard to their requests. Other team members will fare less well.

The part of the work team that handles hardware and software aspects of program development and delivery will be redeployed after the course is up and running, moved to work on development of on-line programs in other areas likely to yield high tuition returns. Traditional academic values about the organization of faculty--that faculty are the most important element of the university, that all tenure-track faculty are roughly equal, that the contribution of the individual faculty is paramount, and that faculty have authority over their courses--will be replaced by values that emphasize managerial flexibility.

There will be increased segmentation of departments and colleges, with those close to the market and geared to the new economy becoming very involved with e-commerce and e-pedagogy, and those that are distant from the market, for example the liberal arts, less so. At the same time, faculty working with conventional curricula will experience increased pressure to utilize online educational tools.

Curricular products

The second set of questions or working hypotheses we have is about curricular products. Here, we take the position that as faculty subject matter specialists become increasingly involved in the development and delivery of on-line courses, they will often be involved in the development of curricular products that will become the intellectual property of the university--not of the faculty. When intellectual property in the form of curricular products is developed, initially there will be conflict over ownership and shares from the proceedings, but routinized ways of dealing with these conflicts, including court decisions, will begin to minimize conflict. Another example, something happening increasingly at elite universities like Stanford and Yale, is the pre-employment contract where the individual signs away rights--copyrights, patents, and trademarks--ahead of time.

Litigation over ownership of curricular products will promote market values in higher education rather than pedagogical values by stressing the centrality of commodities rather than non-alienable expertise possessed by faculty members. Faculty who participate in online education will redefine their work so their research focuses on on-line teaching until their research and the curricular products, whether courseware, software, or hardware, become one and the same.

On-line curricular products will promote training values by using software that promotes knowledge that is coded, finite, and rote rather than educational values that stress higher-order thinking skills developed by dialogue among faculty and students. On-line curricular program products will not be viewed by expert academics as being comparable in quality to conventional programs and products. Yet, faculty involved in conventional curricula will be pressured to make their course materials available as e-education products.

The student population

Our final set of working hypotheses is about student populations. Organization of the on-line course team will incorporate student recruitment functions, including distinctive formulation of market strategy and marketing materials. There will be no gap between locating the student market and educating those students. On-line courses will seek out student niche markets where it is possible to charge a profitable tuition rate. These markets will be bifurcated: lower-middle-class students with some disposable income and little flexibility in terms of when they can take courses, like students at the University of Phoenix, will be one set of niche markets. The other will be upper-middle-class professionals who have their tuitions paid by corporations. Students will be relatively well-to-do, most often enrolling in courses likely to bring high return to the "human capital" investment they are making in e-education.

Students in online courses will gravitate to careers in the new economy, spending their work lives on the information superhighway, members of the flexible labor force, signing on to just-in-time production teams, ready to telecommute anywhere in the world as the demands of the project and the market determine. Standards (entrance exams, grade points) and criteria for selection (cut-off points) and graduation will not be as high as for conventional programs, and they will emphasize experience as heavily as past academic performance.

Marketing strategies and marketing materials will emphasize market values rather than educational values. On-line students will receive higher grades and report more satisfaction with coursework than students of conventional programs, provided that on-line programs are small and have high levels of integration between student and instructor.

Basically, then, we see two e-education tracks, one the lower track and one the higher track, and probably many other niche markets. Those only define the extremes.

We think e-education may be re-shaping technology, markets, and higher education. Specifically, we think faculty work, curricular products, and student access are undergoing subtle but thoroughgoing reorganization. We don't yet have answers to our many questions, but perhaps in a year or two, we will be able to share what we learn.

* Jeffrey Kittay

Sheila Slaughter's hypotheses are working hypotheses, but they're certainly pessimistic. We'll be most interested in knowing how that all turns out. I want to indicate what I've learned about e-education so far and then address some of the dynamics of higher education as it begins to respond to and be a part of a market exchange. I attended a conference called The World Education Market last May. It was the first trade show of its kind with a lot of different entities displaying: software companies, universities, e-learning companies, and ministries of education from several countries.

Some countries are looking to import those educational products and services they cannot provide to their citizens, and they make known the industries they want to promote for export. One of the participants, for example, head of the Technological University of Hong Kong, a very large university, was talking about the situation of Hong Kong and what its educational needs are. And, he mentioned in passing, "We need a nutritional degree in Hong Kong. It's clear that our area needs it. We're too small, and it's impractical for us to start a nutrition department. So, if anyone knows about any nutritional degrees or nutritional courses, please let me know." It occurred to me, as it's probably occurring to you, that there are probably plenty of needs like that. And, if I were a course broker--and I don't know of anyone who specifically is now, but there will be--I'd pick up my phone and call, say, Cornell University. "Do you know about Hong Kong's needs? What do you have online so far on nutrition? Do you have whol e certificates? Do you have degrees? Do you have a course or two? Well, if you do, I will make a deal for you. And, if it works for Hong Kong, it'll work for Singapore." If Hong Kong needs nutrition, then lots of other places do, too. There's a definite market for these kinds of things.

These countries not only have educational needs, but they have workforce training needs where they have to upgrade their workforce quickly to be competitive in the global age. They can't look to their own centralized institutions of education to satisfy those needs. (Those centralized institutions are having enough difficulty dealing with the country's own teenagers.) There definitely is a market for educational products and training.

A few weeks ago, the Chronicle mentioned an agreement in principle between the Palestinians and the University of South Africa to help the Palestinians put together baccalaureate degrees. That would involve an exchange of students but also online technical services. When you read about it, it's initially surprising. But, when you think about it, you realize that the Palestinians are geographically isolated, and they both need higher education and want a distinctive higher education. South Africa has an elite academic tradition. Actually, it also has, through the African National Congress, close ties to the Palestinians, who were supportive of the African National Congress. Why not have South Africa put together a bachelor's degree for Palestinians, which the Palestinians are not in a position to do for themselves? Thus, they will be partners.

What's striking to me is that, at the same time, South Africa has huge educational burdens to solve--literacy and basic skills. Their very democracy, their very way of life depends on it. South Africa can t turn I to its distinguished higher education institutions because they are elite Institutions that haven't grappled much with literacy and basic skills needs. Nor does the country want to insist that these elite institutions change to respond to this demand, for fear that the country will lose these universities as first-class research institutions. Meanwhile, companies in other countries, like Canada, with experience in teaching basic skills, will be bidding for South Africa's business and saying, "This is what we can do to educate your people." So, South Africa will be exporting the kind of education it has a comparative advantage in, and importing the rest.

There is an enormous need, and there is a large global market in education generally and certainly in higher education to meet the need.

Marketization 

I want to pick up on the word "marketization" that Sheila Slaughter used. One dynamic we see when marketers go after the customers of traditional institutions is that they tend to chop you up. They try to decide what you're doing that they need to replicate and improve upon, and what you're doing that they don't need to provide at all. The market is going to choose some of the things you do and promote them to the utmost--and ignore others.

Unfortunately, it will pick up only the stuff that is in demand and lucrative: MBAs, nursing programs, and so forth. It will ignore things that are in demand and non-lucrative, like training for child care workers.

The market is particularly good at looking at the spaces between what you and your fellow institutions do. For instance, there is a bootcamp--that's one of the new phrases--that the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth offers. There it trains its students in a three or four week summer camp that gets them up to speed to prepare for the MBA. A company called Quisic takes that Dartmouth course and markers it around the world. They see that students at the threshold between institutions are a needy group. There are also companies that take students who have just gotten their MBA but have not yet gone into their first day of work at a banking firm. This is very much on the Stanley Kaplan model. Stanley Kaplan was an amazing marketer in that he saw this opportunity. Before him, high schools felt they could represent their student to the college, and the student let the high school speak for him. Kaplan recognized that, in fact, the student feels like a bereft individual at this particular moment, this threshold, a nd so Kaplan fills the gap between the traditional institutions to offer high-value services.

What the market will do is dissect and discriminate. This puts a particularly strong pressure on institutions that want to keep their character as providing a holistic liberal arts education. These institutions argue that they can't be chopped to pieces but must be taken as a whole. It's a difficult argument to make, but it can be made--and I think it will be made. It's also difficult to defend when those institutions have not submitted themselves to the same kind of cold-blooded analysis that a competitor has submitted them to.

Unbundling 

I know one thing that is certainly occurring, and it's my last point. As all these forces come, and some of them are quite inspired and quite positive, they will basically break into pieces much of the holistic educational experience such as you and I experienced it, with unbundling of various kinds. We're going to have to live in a world of this kind, a world of distributed learning where some professors do create courses, some facilitate them, some assess them. It may not happen exactly like that with you or with your children, but it is ultimately the ability to assign parts to different people, to take parts of courses that can be put on video, and parts that can be put on audio, and parts that can be put in books; it's that ability which will redistribute roles in the teaching process.

We're used to such redistribution with respect to books.. Somehow books don't bother us as a (more or less) freely circulating piece of intellectual property. In fact, books are, up to now, the world's most powerful and indispensable asynchronous learning objects. The new world, however, will be one in which we will be dealing not only with the choice of books or the professor's lecture--a distinction we've grown quite comfortable with--but all sorts of other alternatives, other products, all sorts of services. And to continue to do what we think we do well, we will have to develop a kind of skill we don't have now in assessing and analyzing a heterogeneous set of offerings and services, professorial and administrative. And that is, I think, the nature of the next professional challenge for administrators and faculty.

* Paul Duguid

As the final speaker of this panel, I feel confident that anyone who came to hear how to take their school to market will, after two rather gloomy views of the subject, have left by now. If any did not leave, I'm afraid I must announce at once that I'm not going to be the person to present a host of good ideas about marketization. Indeed, what I want to suggest in my very scattershot remarks is my surprise at the general lack of positive ideas--rather than just positive enthusiasm. Coming as I do from Silicon Valley, the heart of commoditization, capitalization, and the dot-com economy, what I hope to do is ask what "going to market"--with learning as the commodity and technology the means to get there--might entail, and how little of what it might entail is generally discussed.

Going to market

Why do I think there are few good ideas? Because of the charm of this word market. Markets, as we know, are famously self organizing, a point that somehow lets us believe that everything will be organized--if only we go to market. And, markets are famous for maximizing the distribution of goods. So, we can believe that knowledge will be optimally distributed, if only we go to market. If we turn our institutions towards this Mecca and intone the words market, and product, and customer, then everything will work out well. With the last in mind it's worth mentioning a remark by Dick Rosenbloom of Harvard Business School, who is writing the history of Xerox (which, as you probably know, has dropped its stock value from some sixty dollars to six). With or without Xerox in mind, he cautioned me that the great thing about markets is that your customers can lead you over a cliff. That's something to bear in mind. Though with the university, we don't actually seem to know who our customers are, nor really what our pro duct is--useful things to know before "going to market." Is the student our customer? or the student's parents? or the student's future employer? If it's the last, is the student then the product, which we sell to the future employer? Or is the product the curriculum that we sell to the customer-students. And where lie the interests of the nation, the state, and society?

If we can sort these things out, I would certainly agree (who am I to fight with economists?) that if you can form a market, it's a very efficient way to distribute goods and services. But that's an enormous "if." Now there comes this extra assumption that because we now have distributive, as Bill Gates would say, friction-free technology, therefore we suddenly, magically, can form markets. The transaction costs have been reduced to an appropriate level. Those of us subject to California's new open market for power or who have ridden on the newly privatized British rail (which has returned to nineteenth-century timetables because its infrastructure can only support nineteenth-century speeds) are a little skeptical about how easy it is to form a market. Drawing on the California example, I would like to reflect a little on the dot-corn economy. As we have recently seen, it is not as magical as we thought.

Cautionary models

One figure that interests me shows that last year there were seventeen dot-corns advertising in the Superbowl; this year there are three. Of those seventeen, seven are already out of business and several of the others have merged. Now, why is that a useful example to choose? Because only four years ago we were so happy to believe that advertising was going to drive the whole "new" economy. It told us how the market was going to work. Now that we suddenly discovered that people can't afford to advertise, we see that half a decade of very elaborate, very convincing business plans about how to go to market with a variety of goods and services have suddenly lost all credibility. Our assumptions about how to go to market, how to market, and where the income streams in the new economy might come from have been forced to change, radically.

So, inevitably, have the business plans--even the business plans of e-education. Obviously, colleges one way or another, are itching to sell what they can from their intellectual property, their services, etc. And, as Sheila Slaughter mentioned, there's the notion, put forward by Michael Moe of Merrill Lynch, that the education sector is woefully undercapitalized. He reckons that, with the right plans, mostly e-plans, we should raise billions of dollars for the education sector over the next ten years through capitalization, rather, he suggests, as the health services did over the last ten. I heard him make this comparison last year, and it intrigued me for a couple of reasons. First, in the last year in California three doctors have pulled their services from beneath me as they abandoned the new markets that had been set up to capitalize health services. And second, at about the same time, the World Health Organization (WHO) released a comparative survey of health services from around the world. The U.S.A. r anked, I think, seventeenth. It was, in fact, one place behind Cuba. That, of course, was a terrible shock because we think that we have the most advanced health service in the world. In some ways we do. But what the WHO included in its rating was access for the entire population to their country's health service. When you factor that in, suddenly we slide down the scale. If we are going to use medicine as a model for capitalizing the education business, for going to market, we want to bear these things in mind.

Can we create a market then becomes mote a question of can we create an equitable market which maximizes distribution? As Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize economist says, if you don't get liquidity you can't create markets. And while it's easy to find liquidity among the wealthy, it's very difficult to create it for the poor, which is why, he argues, famine often occurs where there is adequate food. So here's another point to remember as we seek to capitalize the market for education.

Of course, we do hear a great deal about developing new methods of delivery in order to reach the poor--an admirable notion, and one that drives and justifies much of the public discussion of on-line, asynchronous, and distance education. But I fear a lot of this discussion is mere cant. What we see, rather than what we hear, resembles more what goes on in the phone service, what's called "slamming." Sprint and AT&T, after all, are not trying to expand phone service to the billions of poor on the globe who don't have it. They simply go after each other's wealthy customers. Some years ago at a conference with VPs for marketing from Sprint and AT&T, I heard them admit to figures in the region of 80 percent for the portion of marketing that goes simply into luring each other's customers away, nor creating new ones. So if we hear that Sprint has one million more subscribers this month, they are not new phone users who weren't previously served. Sprint hasn't used the market and marketing to expand its reach, to e nfranchise the informationally disenfranchised. They are taking on existing users who last month subscribed to AT&T--and perhaps the previous month were with Sprint. As we watch e-strategies in education develop, we see some of the same sort of thing. It's those that can already afford an education that many new business plans are eyeing, not those who cannot.

We also need to remember that, though they may often have the same customers in mind, there are lots of different plans on offer, many conflicting views of how the market will work. Do we know how to choose among them? There's the "star system." Figures that I've heard are that there are something like 800,000 faculty in the states at present and that this will reduce to 50,000 content providers and 2,000 stars. One version of this was presented by Michael Saylor of Microstrategies. He was going to create a one hundred million dollar fund, and into that would go course modules in which Bill Clinton would provide politics modules, Steven Spielberg movie-making modules, and Warren Buffet would provide investment teaching. No other political science, film, or investment strategy professors need apply. Given Microstrategies' recent problems with the FTC, they have been quieter about who will teach accounting and business ethics.

Brokers

Or there's the notion of brokers. Economists at the University of Texas-Austin, I think, suggest that software agents are going to basically manage and broker the entire education system for us--so we won't need universities at all. Through a forms-based procedure we will identify our lack of knowledge, software agents will find individuals to provide the knowledge that we need, and we will negotiate online. That's the extreme notion. There's no need for institutions to follow that particular model.

Intellectual property

Of course, these models tend to assume that we can market and protect the intellectual property (IP) involved. But now there is another model following the open source movement in software provision. This is the open course movement. As with open-source software, some people are suggesting that we should actually create new courses in an open source model, where everyone has free access to materials others create in the system, which they can add to and modify as long as they, in turn, leave their inventions in the public domain. This gets around the whole IF question.

Open source has presented a major challenge to software development. And even in the less cut-throat world of universities it presents a quite disarming model. I must say, it amazes me that if I go to talk at universities, one of the first five questions tends to be, "How can I protect my IP?" It's asked either by administration or by faculty. Sitting on either side of the room, they ask the same question from different perspectives--the administrators want to hold IP for the university; highflying academics hope to hold it for themselves. The great challenge of open source is that it has radically challenged conventional understanding of IP and markets in the digital age.

We used to believe that you had to give and diligently protect private property rights in order to get innovation. That's the oldest argument for intellectual property. And it's one that universities have turned to as they think of going to market. The open source movement with Linux, Apache, GNU, and so forth said no, the way you really get creativity is by replacing copyright with what they call copyleft and hence replacing private property rights with a vibrant public domain. And Linux is now a major force in the world of innovation and creativity. People are saying that perhaps Bill Gates shouldn't have been prosecuted by the government because Linux is going to undo his monopoly. If open source can threaten one of the greatest marketers of intellectual property, then those of us who are thinking of stepping into that market and who are already facing an open course movement need to pause a while.

What's on the market

Even if we can go to market, we need to ask: Will these markets work efficiently? I spend a lot of time in Portugal. One of the things that worries me is that there the public sector is very strong but very limited. Limits were set under the dictatorship of Salazar and his successors, and since the revolution of 1974, the state sector hasn't really had time or money to expand. There is, though, a huge need, and the private sector has come in to fill the gap. Now in the private sector, there are a few very good places, like the Universidade Cat6lica Portuguesa. But there's a number of new private universities that should simply be regarded as fraudulent. And there are some that are highly dubious. These successfully prey on the lower-middle class who have heard about the benefits of education but who can't get into the major public schools, and who enroll for degrees whose quality they can't readily assess.

It's a very worrying picture. What I once hoped would happen was that people would discover that those degrees are really not worth having, and schools putting forward bad degrees would soon be pushed out of the market. Contrary to standard assumptions, I was naive enough to hope that good money would drive Out bad But that doesn't seem to be happening. If it is, it's a slow process, during which generations of students are being imposed upon and ripped off.

Closing points

A few quick closing points. One is that we have to understand how heavily subsidized by the government the higher education sector is. If we go to market, do we renounce that subsidy? Do we pay it back? (Working out how to pay off its public debt created many of the problems that now bedevil the California power market, which explains why San Diego is subject to escalating power prices, while northern California is faced with bankrupt utilities.) And if we renounce government subsidy, will capital markets make it up? And, as Jeffrey Kittay was suggesting, in what form and with what interests? To a great degree, the system today, with all its faults, is one of welfare economics, premised on an unspoken notion of social transfers. unspoken, because social transfers are very difficult things to talk about in the United States.

The education system also has very high transaction costs. Can we reduce those if we want to go to market? Will we use branding to do so? And is that wise? We already know that branding is enormously significant. We see people such as FT Knowledge, Foresight, and Cardean/UNext trying to engross brands. But what will that mean for everybody else--those without the great brand names? And will brand alone guarantee a good education?

So, to go back to my opening remarks, markets may or may not be the future, but even if they are, they don't in themselves offer a sure guide for how to get to that future. They will reward the winners and they will punish, as we always know, the losers. But beyond such truisms, we have to come up with concrete ideas, better plans, colder assessments, and less cant if that's the way we decide to go. Simply saying we are going to market, or we must go to market sounds impressive, but tells us very little.

SHEILA SLAUGHTER is professor at the Center for the Study of Higher Education at the University of Arizona. JEFFREY KITTAY is editor of University Business arid founder arid editor-in-chief of Lingua Franca. PAUL DUGUID is research specialist in social and cultural studies in education at the University of California at Berkeley.

RELATED ARTICLE: VOICES FROM THE ANNUAL MEETING

I am a longtime participant in AAC&U meetings and projects, a faculty member whose career and work in faculty development has been profoundly influenced by AAC&U's initiatives. I look to AAC&U to be in the vanguard not only of future needs and trends in higher education, but in what is right and good in U.S. higher education. Hence comes my disappointment in the January 2001 national meeting in New Orleans. As a faculty member committed to the values and the uniqueness of the U.S. model of liberal education, I have been threatened and frustrated by the consumerist discourse that is dominating private colleges. Thus, I was dismayed when I received the announcement of the New Orleans meeting, subtitled "Technology, Markets, and the Aims of Education." I went to the Annual Meeting, and I have to say I was shocked and demoralized by... [some] speakers' uncritical enthusiasm for distance learning, especially of the highly commodified type purveyed by forprofit new institutions.

That evening, I attended the Members Meeting. I want to commend the way it was organized around substantive discussion. The group assignment was to talk about how the value of liberal learning could be made clearer to the public. However, at my table, the general sentiment was that "liberal education" is a problematic concept. One person said that people object to the term liberal education because they think it means we're educating students to be politically liberal. Then someone said that the Association avoided the "L word." I honestly felt as if I were in the Twilight Zone.

AAC&U has a long track record of dedication to liberal education. I understand that it's important to be more inclusive and egalitarian. But I would have thought the point would be to embrace what they do with regard to liberal learning, not to throw our the baby with the bath water.

But I just want to say that I hope as an organization, AAC&U is going to continue its tradition of independent vision, of leading even when it goes against the popular grain, and not just give in to professionalization and consumerism. If AAC&U doesn't resist the takeover of education by market ideology, there is no hope for any of us.

Eve Stoddard is chair of the global studies department and professor of English at St. Lawrence University