Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line

Reviews / Votes

An illuminating view of both good and bad results in a market-driven educational system. -- David Siegfried Booklist 20031115 Kirp has an eye for telling examples, and he captures the turmoil and transformation in higher education in readable style. -- Karen W. Arenson New York Times 20031109 Mr. Kirp is both quite fair and a good reporter; he has a keen eye for the important ways in which bean-counting has transformed universities, making them financially responsible and also more concerned about developing lucrative specialties than preserving the liberal arts and humanities. Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is one of the best education books of the year, and anyone interested in higher education will find it to be superior. -- Martin Morse Wooster Washington Times 20031214 There is a place for the market in higher education, Kirp believes, but only if institutions keep the market in its place...Kirp's bottom line is that the bargains universities make in pursuit of money are, inevitably, Faustian. They imperil academic freedom, the commitment to sharing knowledge, the privileging of need and merit rather than the ability to pay, and the conviction that the student/consumer is not always right. -- Glenn C. Altschuler Philadelphia Inquirer 20031228 David Kirp's fine new book, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line, lays out dozens of ways in which the ivory tower has leaned under the gravitational influence of economic pressures and the market. -- Carlos Alcala Sacramento Bee 20040229 The real subject of Kirp's well-researched and amply footnoted book turns out to be more than this volume's subtitle, 'the marketing of higher education.' It is, in fact, the American soul. Where will our nation be if instead of colleges transforming the brightest young people as they come of age, they focus instead on serving their paying customers and chasing the tastes they should be shaping? Where will we be without institutions that value truth more than money and intellectual creativity more than creative accounting? ...Kirp says plainly that the heart of the university is the common good. The more we can all reflect upon that common good--not our pocketbooks or retirement funds, but what is good for the general mass of men and women--the better the world of the American university will be, and the better the nation will be as well. -- Peter S. Temes San Francisco Chronicle 20031228 David Kirp's excellent book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line provides a remarkable window into the financial challenges of higher education and the crosscurrents that drive institutional decision-making...Kirp explores the continuing battle for the soul of the university: the role of the marketplace in shaping higher education, the tension between revenue generation and the historic mission of the university to advance the public good...This fine book provides a cautionary note to all in higher education. While seeking as many additional revenue streams as possible, it is important that institutions have clarity of mission and values if they are going to be able to make the case for continued public support. -- Lewis Collens Chicago Tribune 20040627 In this delightful book David Kirp...tells the story of markets in U.S. higher education...[It] should be read by anyone who aspires to run a university, faculty or department. -- Terence Kealey Times Higher Education Supplement David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line is more than a breath of fresh air: it is a healthy slap upside the head to academics who think they are immune to the grubbing and grabbing of raw market forces. Elegant, amusing, irreverent, refreshingly written, and beautifully edited, this book shakes the scales off a purist's eyes... [Kirp] balances descriptions of the impressive successes of some experiments with a warning that the assertion "leave it to the market" is itself a political statement, "a default of institutional leadership and an abandonment of the idea of a university's mission." His concluding chapter raises all the right questions about the balance between providing for the private gain of individuals and corporations by charging market rates for the products of professors' work and protecting the common good by arranging subsides for the things that enrich society but that do not pay for themselves (like "sociology, comparative literature, and pure mathematics"). -- David W. Leslie Academe 20040701