Such commercial relationships can offer many benefits and advantages to the university. They can provide new educational opportunities to current students and to potential student markets, particularly opportunities to gain practical experience outside the university. They can expand and enhance existing curricula. They can lead to employment opportunities for students both during their school years and after graduation. They can widen the relationships that faculty have outside the academic community and contribute to faculty members' research or artistic endeavors.
Commercial relationships can develop sources of advice and expertise for the university.
They can provide new sources of revenue, and they can help to increase awareness of the university and its schools in various external constituencies. While commercial relationships have many attractive aspects, they also raise special concerns about their consistency with the university's basic mission, values, and responsibilities. As the preservation of academic and artistic freedom is crucial to the university's pursuit of its educational and scholarly goals, the university must be particularly wary of activities that might compromise that freedom of inquiry. Commercial relationships pose the possibility that the university's reputation for serious inquiry, instruction and artistic expression will be compromised by commercialization. They also might lead to a distortion in students' academic programs, where the demands of the commercial arrangements rather than sound educational judgements determine the course a student's program takes.