ABSTRACT
The public dialogue about higher education has been dominated by political partisans outside the academy, angry parents who feel cheated by high tuition for graduate assistant instructors, and a gaggle of disgruntled academics who berate the profession from the fringes. If American faculty have been reluctant to assume a public role, and are often ineffective as public spokespersons, they have in their defense the lack of a historical model for such a role. It was only in the 1960s that higher education became predominantly a state-funded affair. The logic of the discourse of business is clearly one that the public and the politicians are prepared to understand and endorse, but when university officials adopted it, they yielded their own authority to define higher education and surrendered the institutions to the laws of the market economy. The fiscal future will almost surely bring increasing requests for public funding that will outrun the willingness of the public to raise taxes.
