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Book Review Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education by David L. Kirp, Harvard University Press, 2003
In Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education, David L. Kirp argues that the path of higher education for the past three decades reflects the business metaphor that has been superimposed over colleges and universities: "For better or for worse-for better and for worse, really-American higher education is being transformed by the power and the ethic of the marketplace" (2). Responding to the fiscal realities of the 1970s and declining government support for higher education, the architects of higher education borrowed from business its key principles and its language; as a result, higher education has been reimagined as a market. Kirp does not romanticize his subject, imagining some golden age in which monetary concerns never surfaced as scholars roamed their sumptuous campuses, reclining on artfully designed sofas, fanned by devotees busily adorning their velvet lapels with flowers and perfuming the air with quotations from Shakespeare. He acknowledges that money has always been a factor in higher education, but recently the emphasis has shifted: "What is new, and troubling, is the raw power that money directly exerts over so many aspects of higher education" (3). Money changes from one factor among many to the primary factor in the American university.
The "market" view of the university shapes the path of American higher education to such a degree that Kirp calls its new prominence a revolution. Linking his analysis to the often-revised classics-Riesman and Jencks's The Academic Revolution (1968) and Kerr's The Uses of the University (1964)-he characterizes the current state of American higher education as the second wave of a revolution:
A "revolution" is how David Riesman and Christopher Jencks, writing in 1968, characterized the shift from Mr. Chips's tranquil pre-World War Il world of the academic village to Clark Kerr's teeming "multiversity"; and "revolution" is at least as good a description of the present, what Kerr himself has called "the greatest critical age of higher education." New educational technologies; a generation of students with different desires and faculty with different demands; a new breed of rivals that live or die by the market; the incessant demand for more funds and...