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Remaking the American University: Market-Smart and Mission-Centered
By Robert Zemsky, Gregory R. Wegner, and William P. Massy
About “Remaking the American University”
At one time, universities educated new generations and were a source of
social change. Today colleges and universities are less places of
public purpose, than agencies of personal advantage. Remaking the
American University provides a penetrating analysis of the ways market
forces have shaped and distorted the behaviors, purposes, and
ultimately the missions of universities and colleges over the past
half-century.
The authors describe how a competitive preoccupation with rankings and
markets published by the media spawned an admissions arms race that
drains institutional resources and energies. Equally revealing are the
depictions of the ways faculty distance themselves from their
universities with the resulting increase in the number of
administrators, which contributes substantially to institutional costs.
Other chapters focus on the impact of intercollegiate athletics on
educational mission, even among selective institutions; on the
unforeseen result of higher education's "outsourcing" a substantial
share of the scholarly publication function to for-profit interests;
and on the potentially dire consequences of today's zealous investments
in e-learning.
A central question extends through this series of explorations: Can
universities and colleges today still choose to be places of public
purpose? In the answers they provide, both sobering and enlightening,
the authors underscore a consistent and powerful lesson-academic
institutions cannot ignore the workings of the markets. The challenge
ahead is to learn how to better use those markets to achieve public
purposes.
From the reviews of “Remaking the American University”
“The authors’ repeated call for a new and open ‘conversation’ between
all the stakeholders in the institution of higher education is ... an
attractive goal. The decades-long change in the place of the university
in U.S. society connects with a change in the spatial and temporal
scale of production and consumption that a university is thought to
embody. Are universities to be supported by federal initiatives, state
initiatives, or individual family tuition dollars? Are universities to
be seen as educating whole generations of youth over the long term or
professionalizing individual consumers over the short term? Are
universities to be seen as producers of long-term knowledge with global
import or state and regional engines of short-term economic growth? And
are university educations to be seen as key moments in the lives of
their participants which provide a critical and unrepeatable foundation
for lifelong future learning and wisdom or as transitory steps on a
long and fragmented career ladder? Arguing that “members of
academic communities do not talk enough, they do not talk to each
other, and they do not talk about values” (p. 213) the authors of
Remaking the American University remind us that such a conversation
should be centered not only on individual-scale costs and benefits, but
also on societal-scale problems and solutions. Readers should remember
that this is a conversation that not only university managers but
university laborers and their “markets” themselves need to engage in as
well.”
Greg Downey, in TC Record
Contents
1. Introduction: The diminishing of public purpose 2. The lattice and
the ratchet 3. The admissions arms race 4. On being mission-centered
and market-smart 5. To publish and perish 6. A value proposition 7.
Thwarted innovation 8. Who owns teaching? 9. Making educational quality
job one 10. Not good enough 11. Crafting a public agenda 12. Dancing
with change
Publication information
August 2005
Rutgers University Press
ISBN 0-8135-3624-3
Hardcover, $24.95 ORDER
224 pages
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