Princeton University Press
Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education
Key Metrics
- Derek Bok
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691120126
- 9.22 X 6.12 X 0.6 inches
- 0.8 pounds
- Education > Higher
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Is everything in a university for sale if the price is right? In this book, one of America's leading educators cautions that the answer is all too often yes. Taking the first comprehensive look at the growing commercialization of our academic institutions, Derek Bok probes the efforts on campus to profit financially not only from athletics but increasingly, from education and research as well. He shows how such ventures are undermining core academic values and what universities can do to limit the damage.
Commercialization has many causes, but it could never have grown to its present state had it not been for the recent, rapid growth of money-making opportunities in a more technologically complex, knowledge-based economy. A brave new world has now emerged in which university presidents, enterprising professors, and even administrative staff can all find seductive opportunities to turn specialized knowledge into profit.
Bok argues that universities, faced with these temptations, are jeopardizing their fundamental mission in their eagerness to make money by agreeing to more and more compromises with basic academic values. He discusses the dangers posed by increased secrecy in corporate-funded research, for-profit Internet companies funded by venture capitalists, industry-subsidized educational programs for physicians, conflicts of interest in research on human subjects, and other questionable activities.
While entrepreneurial universities may occasionally succeed in the short term, reasons Bok, only those institutions that vigorously uphold academic values, even at the cost of a few lucrative ventures, will win public trust and retain the respect of faculty and students. Candid, evenhanded, and eminently readable, Universities in the Marketplace will be widely debated by all those concerned with the future of higher education in America and beyond.
Author Bio
Derek Bok is the 300th Anniversary University Research Professor at Harvard University. He served as the twenty-fifth president of Harvard from 1971 to 1991, and as interim president from 2006 to 2007. His many books include The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges, Higher Education in America, Our Underachieving Colleges, and The Shape of the River (all Princeton).
Derek Curtis Bok (born March 22, 1930) is an American lawyer and educator, and the acting president of Harvard University. He was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Stanford University (B.A. 1951), Harvard Law School (LL.B. 1954), and George Washington University (A.M. 1958). He taught at Harvard from 1958, where he served as dean of the law school (1968-1971) and then as university president (1971-1991). Bok currently serves as the Faculty Chair at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard and continues to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He reassumed the presidency of the university on an interim basis after Larry Summers’ resignation took effect on July 1, 2006. He expects to have the job for about a year.
His wife, the sociologist and philosopher Sissela Bok, née Myrdal (daughter of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and the politician and diplomat Alva Myrdal, both Nobel laureates), is also affiliated with Harvard, where she received her doctorate in 1970. His daughter, Hilary Bok, is a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Source: Princeton University Press and wikipedia.org
Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews