This approach, and its effects, are perhaps most dramatically apparent in England. First, these trends in combination make it much harder to emphasize learning for learning's sake and scholarship defined broadly. Second, it becomes harder to keep universities collegial and faculty-centered. It becomes harder for faculty to advocate the values of higher learning and of the institution at large as they are encouraged by the market, by their colleagues, and maybe even by their leaders to become ever more entrepreneurial. That mission includes opportunity, support of the arts, and doing something to address racial divides, which have little to do with money but which are enormously important in our country.
Universities have, off and on, been accused of being too aloof.
Now I think they can be accused sometimes of being too with-it, too responsive to market incentives of one kind or another. Now I turn to directions in which we might move. I want to make one very general point and then give you a specific illustration of one thing that might help. My general point is that we need to think more clearly than we have done about instances in which competition is a truly productive driver, as it often is in the right settings, and situations in which it is not and in which collaboration is really what we ought to emphasize. There is a tremendous intellectual challenge here, I believe, in parsing out, in a quite sophisticated way, situations in which one mode or the other is more appropriate.