ABSTRACT
One can find the new idea of the university in what might seem an unlikely place, the 1996 blockbuster The Nutty Professor. The work of a professor in the earlier popular imaginary is coded primarily as teaching rather than research; research is in fact prohibited by university policy. In the new corporate-model, profit-protocol university, administrative jobs, rather than being service positions integrated with faculty interests, have become preeminent, constituted as top-down, "winner-take-all" jobs, and administrations now account for a substantial proportion of university budgets. In short, higher education has become a substantial banking franchise, a new domain of extraordinary, low-risk profit for Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Marine Midland, and other sanctioned lenders. Most accounts of "the idea of the university," from Kant's Conflict of the Faculties through Bill Readings's University in Ruins, are internal and prescriptive, expressing our self-definition and centering on the disciplinary history of an idea rather than the historical institution.
