I’ve just read Kirp’s Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line. It came out a few years ago (2003), but it’s new to me ;). Here’s the "bottom line" to me. Kirp does not naively express nostalgia for a time when academia had a united sense of itself and its values (as if such a time ever really existed), but he does note that the absence of a strong sense of institutional identity and purpose makes opposing academic capitalism more difficult. That is, we can oppose the enterprise university, at least its more virulent and distasteful aspects, but what do we oppose it to? This is where we become quickly mired in ideology. Without access to the "universal" values of a traditional, humanistic education, any values we espouse necessarily reflect an ideology. Indeed even the opposition or support of academic capitalism is an ideological position.

He also points out that the marketing of higher education, academic entrepenurialism (whether it takes the form of industrial-research partnerships or online education), and the emergence of customer-type relations with students cannot simply be equated with the transformation of the academy into yet another industry. That is, academics has its own unique flavor and special relationship with its clients, different from that of other industries (though this begs the question for me of how different/similar agriculture industries are to pharmaceutical or auto or movie or software industries and so on).

One disappointment for me with the book is that Kirk doesn’t deal with instutions like my own: middle-of-the-road comprehensive colleges, public or private. He deals primarily with elite research institutions (Univ. of Chicago, NYU, Univ of Michigan, Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Univ of Michigan) with one study of an elite private liberal arts college. He also talks about some online programs, including Oxbridge’s OPEN university, and for-profit ventures like DeVry.

The fact is that much of the work of higher education is undertaken at institutions like Cortland. The case studies demonstrate how unique each institutional situation can be, so I’m not sure how much there is to be learned in local terms from Kirp’s book.

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