Less famously but more commonly, universities are investing millions to recruit leading scientists. Columbia was able to hold on to a prizewinning chemist only by promising to buy a piece of property and build a new lab to house a multimillion-dollar piece of equipment. Meanwhile, less lucrative academic pursuits are maintained as museums of the outmoded, and their curatorial faculty is paid a comparative pittance. As recently as a quarter-century ago, approximate parity in salaries was the norm, but today a full professor of English earns no more than a starting assistant professor of accounting. They are customers whose preferences are to be satisfied, not challenged by intellectual heresies.
Students are less idealistic, more vocationally oriented, than ever.
A quarter of all undergraduates now major in business, up from just 4 percent in 1970, while enrollment in the social sciences and humanities plummets. Faculty at some schools feel the pressure to keep grade-point averages high to keep the customers happy. The most academically talented students are avidly recruited by universities anxious for a loftier perch in the academic pecking order. This is the market functioning at its best. But at the same time, the gap between elite universities and mass institutions is widening.