Abstract

t the close of the twentieth century, College English published a special issue of essays subtitled Symposium: English 1999. As the title indicates, the collected articles address contemporary English departments. Although most articles focus on the specific pedagogical or professional exigencies of English studies, the last essay of this issue, Jeffrey Williams's Brave New University, raises a more general concern about the shift in university focus from scholarship to salesmanship (742). Williams argues that the increasingly privatized structure of the university significantly redefines the goals of higher education. Rather than characterizing universities and their faculty as places where experts work for the common good, popular discourse-from films to news media-reinforces the corporate image by depicting the university within a commercial profit rationale (745). Because a supposedly new profit motive impinges on the traditional mission of the university, Williams asks that academics critique this corporatized form of higher education, distinguish the university as a not-for-profit institution, and develop representations of the university that reclaim its foundations in the public good (749-50). At the same time that I appreciate Williams's indictment of the privatized university system, I am troubled by the prevailing sentiment-among conservative and liberal thinkers alike-that the university has strayed from its civic-minded origins and transformed itself into a site of corporate demagoguery. Recent discussion surrounding the contemporary university system suggests that an altruistic, even philanthropic, ethos overwhelmingly defines our understanding of higher education's original mission. Consider, for instance, the plethora of books that emerged in the 1990s detailing the failure of higher education. While these