Charlie Peters says "While I was working for the Peace Corps back in the 1960s, I began to notice that the idealism of the students who were volunteering for our and other worthy causes was accompanied by a less noble but growing trend towards commercialism by their universities"
TILTING AT WINDMILLS: ; FOX practically ignored; Democratic convention
Sep 12, 2004
Sunday Gazette - Mail; Charleston, W.Va.
Author(s): Charles Peters
[Excerpt]
While I was working for the Peace Corps back in the 1960s, I began to notice that the idealism of the students who were volunteering for our and other worthy causes was accompanied by a less noble but growing trend towards commercialism by their universities. Prestigious institutions were committing larceny with outrageous charges for what they called "overhead" on contracts for the training of our volunteers. Professors were opening outside offices to moonlight as "consultants." It seemed that every second floor on Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, Mass., housed another consulting firm.
The trend was only in its infancy. Potential profits have soared. Now we have what James B. Twitchell, writing in the Wilson Quarterly, describes as "a $250-$270 billion business." He calls it Higher Ed., Inc. Just one institution, Harvard, has an endowment of $20 billion, which Twitchell describes as "greater than the assets of the Dell Computer Company, the gross national product of Libya, the net worth of all but five of the Forbes 400, or the holdings of all the nonprofits in the world except the Roman Catholic Church ... Every two weeks, Harvard's endowment throws off enough cash to cover all undergraduate tuition." Instead it adds to the endowment and increases salaries for faculty and administrators.
Harvard's five top money managers, according to The New York Times, were paid $105 million last year.
Those entrepreneurial professors I began to encounter in the '60s are having their talents harnessed by Higher Education, Inc. to tap another fiscal oil well. At the University of Pittsburgh, reports Bernard Wysocki of The Wall Street Journal, Dr. David Kuptor, the head of the psychiatry department, has helped the university move from 12th to eighth in the amount of grants received from the National Institutes of Health in just five years, by requiring his students "to attend boot camps" for writing applications for grants, and by paying researchers bonuses of as much as $50,000 a year based on how much NIH money they bring to Pitt.
Higher Ed, Inc. is also going in big for marketing. The student is seen as a customer, whose every need must be satisfied. Education as an objective is being lost in a scramble to provide "Olympic-quality gyms, Broadway-style theaters for plays, special trainers, and glitzy student unions with movie theaters." My favorite is Washington State University, which offers its students the "largest Jacuzzi in the West."
