Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education | Date: 28 April 2011, 05:42
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Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education
By David L. Kirp
* Publisher: Harvard University Press
* Number Of Pages: 336
* Publication Date: 2004-09-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0674016343
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780674016347
Product Description:
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How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are ""customers"" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success.
With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities ""brand"" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting.
Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?
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Summary: What is the Bottom Line?!!!
Rating: 2
I'm not sure what book everyone else was reading, but this book made my head absolutely hurt. It jumped from past to present, and had way too much going on in the chapters. I found myself saying GET TO THE POINT ALREADY!!! YOU ARE CIRCLING THE AIRPORT...LAND THIS BABY!!! I just didn't think it was a good read at all, and there has to be something better.
Summary: Laudable, but Limited by Its Methodology
Rating: 3
This informative and provocative book is presented as a series of case studies. They cover a quite comprehensive set of issues and institutions. Among schools mentioned or treated in depth are U of Chicato, Dickinson College, NYU, New York Law School, USC, U Michigan, UVA, Columbia, MIT, Rhodes College in Memphis, the British "Open University," the University of CA (various campuses), the University of Phoenix, and DeVry University (the last two are for-profits). The problems faced by these various schools -- raising operating funds, preserving their missions, collaborating with private industry, surviving a ratings-driven admissions process, adapting to and exploiting technology -- are issues that each institution faces in ways that are both distinctive and overlapping. The case-study method permits exploration of the complexities of the higher education landscape without reductiveness.
The method, however, does have its drawbacks. Too many issues (for instance, the role of technology) circle around repeatedly, so one starts to feel issue-fatigue. Also, the case study method attempts to "tell a story," often featuring personalities. The approach borrows a lot from the "New Journalism." For example, here is the opening sentence of Chapter 3: "For William Durden, the peripatetic president of Dickinson College, the October 5, 2001, issue of the Wall Street Journal contained some very good news." Well, maybe that gets a reader to want to keep going (actually, it turns me off), but it also suggests a focus on individuals and their impact on the places where they work, not on the abstract patterns to be found in the problems they confront.
This focus competes with the underlying structural argument of the book, which I take to be the following: The line between the academy and the marketplace is increasingly blurred in ways that are both exciting but also dangerous to the underlying mission of higher education. If institutions and their leaders do not become more self-conscious about this problem, they will be in danger of selling their schools down the river; i.e., there will be no problem with selling the academy because in essence the academy, as a separate institution in our society, will not longer exist. It will already have morphed into a trade school.
However, I did not really understand that this was the message until I got to the final chapter, entitled "Conclusion: The Corporation of Learning." (I'd actually suggest readers START with this chapter.) That's because the case study method provides lots of details and not very much analysis. It's also because Kirp wrote this book by conducting (or having others conduct) a lot of very specific interviews, which he does not seem entirely to have digested and because he entrusted the writing of a good part of this book to his graduate students and research assistants (see his "Acknowledgments," which are tucked away at the very end of the book).
In sum, this is an engaging book. It's full of interesting and useful narratives. In the broadness of its focus, it's really quite ambitious. But, in the end, it feels a little half-baked. It's a reasonable place to start thinking about some of the important issues it raises, but its focus is too fragmented and specific to permit the kind of abstract and sustained analysis that these issues truly require.
Summary: Excellent analysis on higher education
Rating: 5
This is an excellent analysis of the current state of affairs in higher education. The book includes 14 chapters including the conclusion. Each chapter can be read independently, as they follow the famed Harvard case study method. Each chapter describes a unique issue impacting higher education. Some of these interesting issues include: a) the advent and so far failing of online higher education; b) the success of for profit publicly traded university companies; c) the new sources of funds for universities, including copyrights and patents; d) the ongoing restructuring of undergraduate core curriculum to please the students and private industry; e) the shrinking government subsidization of public universities and their resulting de facto privatization; f) the compromising of the independence of university research when financed by the private sector; and f) various attempts to revive the liberal arts discipline within an increasingly profit driven higher education culture.
Throughout these issues, the authors covers recurring themes. These include the many conflict of interest between: a) intellectual culture and profits; b) professors' research activities and undergraduate teaching; c) practical job oriented education and liberal arts.
Some of these fascinating themes beg the questions of what is knowledge? What is culture? Even what is critical thinking? During the Renaissance the answer to such questions would include being fluent in both Latin and Greek in addition to a couple of vernacular languages. It also entailed having an extremely developed art appreciation supported by demonstrated artistic capabilities. A broad and deep understanding of most aspects of science was also important. Thus, in comparison to this ideal Renaissance Mind model, we are really all a bunch of illiterates no matter how well educated we are.
The author finishes the book by asking what will be the Latin and Greek disciplines of tomorrow. What he means by that is what will be the dying intellectual disciplines that will not survive our practical and profit driven culture. He ventu
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