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Giving Universities the Business Essay

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Giving Universities the Business

"The business of America is business." Calvin Coolidge

"To talk in public, to think in solitude, to read and to hear, to inquire and answer inquiries, is the business of a scholar." Samuel Johnson

In the last ten years there has been a concerted movement in this country to re-design schools according to the Business Model--a movement which has recently gained an apparently unstoppable momentum. We hear continually of the university's need to open up "new markets," to learn new ways to "compete" and create new "customer bases"; simultaneously, we are bombarded with demands from the politicians and administrators who control our public funds to increase our "productivity" and "accountability." (1) …show more content…

(2) The implicit assumption of this and similar reports was that, left on their own, scholars had turned American education into doctrinaire trivia, and that University faculties particularly were, as a now infamous editorial in the Wall Street Journal put it, a "new leisure class" which needed the firm hand and clear vision of the business community to put things right.

How to refute this? During the period which this camp claims saw the wholesale deterioration of American education, American universities developed and grew like never before and American graduate schools became the envy of the entire world. But even more specifically, hasty calculation will reveal that a professor teaching 4/4 must work 60 hour weeks (and that's figured over a 50 week year). (3) There may be lazy communities out there, but the university ain't one of them.

Which brings us to the Times Are Tough argument. My response to this is simple: when have times not been tough? I find it hard to believe that university's of today are faced with any greater

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