64 Strategic Leadership
pursuing contracts for research and professional services with government and
business. Some of the newer contracts are especially promising because they may
lead to the university’s ownership of start-up companies or licensing of processes,
with the prospect of large cash flows. A large new sports stadium is expected to
be another source of revenue, though many shudder at its cost and fear the influ-
ence of business sponsorship that it entails. Clearly, an entrepreneurial model of
choice animates the university.
With all these developments, people wonder often and aloud whether the
institution itself has not become another kind of industry—University, Inc. Has
it become a creature of the market, a corporation producing entertainment and
knowledge for anyone who will pay for it? To many, the university has reached
the point of compromising its deepest values of open inquiry to serve the propri-
etary needs of its research customers. Its purposes seem splintered and incoherent,
and its values expedient and vulgar.^1 It seems no longer sure how to think about
itself and its purposes. Strategies and plans are everywhere, but they reflect a wild
variety of aims and pursuits that have no center. These very questions show that
the paradigm of the academy, in spite of its mysterious disappearance, continues
to serve as the touchstone for the values and beliefs of many of its university
descendants. The golden age lingers in memory and in hope.
The Educational Shopping Mall
There is no ambiguity about the language and values in the paradigm of the
educational shopping mall, for they are borrowed unabashedly from the world of
commerce. Its conceptual scaffolding is structured by the logic of strategy, mar-
kets, customers, pricing, and branding. The primal assumption in the mall is that
a successful organization finds its niche in the market by attracting and satisfy-
ing customers. Strategic planning is a discipline of management that guides the
process of branding and marketing. Whether the customers ever experience the
academy’s love of knowledge for its own sake is of little consequence as long as
they are satisfied and keep coming. Here value is contingent and instrumental and
is measured by the calculating logic of marginal benefit to the consumer.
The imagery that accompanies this pattern of pragmatic presuppositions depicts
education as a form of commerce. In our mind’s eye we see a mall with students
choosing from among the educational equivalents of boutiques, specialty shops,
and department stores. Charging markedly different prices, the stores advertise
with catchy slogans such as “Learn more, pay less” and “Useful education for
today’s world.” The taglines are based on extensive market research that shows
that customers want job training and are increasingly inclined to bargain over
prices. They also want the stores to be open at all hours, meeting the needs of the
customers, not the teachers. The mall offers programs and credentials that can
be completed in short periods of time to fit the busy lives of the students, most of
whom work full-time and have family obligations. As a result, customers complain
loudly if too much is expected of them, so little is.