ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the fraught relationship between religiously founded universities and their current boards of trustees to show that market-driven secularization has not robbed these universities of moral intention but has rather shifted the grounds of their moral discernment. In the course of becoming a product in a higher education marketplace, university standards for discernment shifted to identifying their respective graduates with passing on a particular, luxury brand of socio-cultural status, not moral fitness. Thus, universities are caught, it argues, between a stated commitment to foster a more democratic society and the need to maintain financial viability and an exclusive brand through profitable investments in the marketplace. The chapter concludes with a case study on market-driven secularization in the context of conflicting arguments for and against asset divestment.
