Abstract
The Red Light in the Ivory Tower: Contexts and Implications of Entrepreneurial Education is an interesting and provocative book. In a short amount of space it lays out a critical set of issues facing higher education in the United States (and elsewhere) as well as giving us some case studies to see how these issues work out in different institutions. Authors Donna Breault and David Callejo-Pérez suggest that we can make a typology of institutions of higher education following Brewer, Gates, and Goldman (2001) and divide them into prestigious universities, prestige-seeking universities, and reputation-oriented universities. For most of the book, the authors focus on the prestigious and the prestige-seeking universities.
The authors begin the book (again following Brewer, Gates, and Goldman) with the distinction between reputation and prestige. They point out that any university can build its reputation in particular areas. Reputation is built on the recognition that there are results coming from a good program, or curriculum, or a piece of research. Most importantly, reputation is not a zero sum game. Several universities, in the same city, can have a reputation for a good English program. And the fact that one English program is very good does not need to diminish the quality of another program. But prestige, on the other hand, is a status-based system and so by necessity is zero sum. U.S. News and World Report’s ranking system is a ranking of university prestige and, like other systems that rank universities, there are those that are at the top and those that are at the bottom.
Prestige is very important for contemporary universities. It is the thing that draws top faculty and students to a university. While having a good program is valuable, being at a prestigious university is even more valuable. As a hierarchical system, Breault and Callejo-Pérez point out that there are a very small number of prestigious universities. While they are not rigid in how they define this group, they point out that the top ten U.S. News and World Report universities have at least $1.6 billion dollars in their endowments, and the very top universities have much more than this. Prestige, following Brewer, Gates, and Goldman, is accumulated by having selective admissions, top rankings, a large number of federal grants, and national rankings in sports. And Breault and Callejo-Pérez importantly emphasize endowment as both a criterion and as a resource for the other prestige markers.
Breault and Callejo-Pérez then go on to make the most important points in the book. There are many prestige-seeking universities. They seek prestige because it is the coin of the realm. It is the way to enhance the status of your institution, create meaning for the members of your university community, and secure the future of the university by being able to bring in top students and top grant-getting faculty who can secure the university’s financial future in difficult financial times. This focus on seeking prestige, however, undermines the reputation and quality of programs because it distracts faculty from being good faculty and forces them to focus on prestige-seeking activities. And most importantly, like all status systems, without the billions of dollars in the endowment to begin with, the likelihood of moving from being a prestige-seeking university to being a prestigious one is non-existent. Universities can move up and down the U.S. News rankings and to a lesser extent the National Research Council (NRC) rankings, but they will only change their relative position in the prestige-seeking realm. They will not become prestigious.
Breault and Callejo-Pérez then go on to contextualize the discussion of prestige and prestige-seeking in the larger political economy. They do an adequate job within the limited space they have; but, as they themselves point out, this is a complex story. In fact, the story could be more clearly told by separating out a moment of what we could call “the commodification of higher education” (Aronowitz 2000, Bok 2004, Redding 1996, Shumar 1997, Slaughter and Leslie 1997) and then a more recent moment of “neoliberalization of higher education” (Canaan and Shumar 2008, Giroux 2002, Newfield 2008, Olssen and Peters 2005, Shore 2008, Shore and Wright 2000, Slaughter and Rhodes 2004).
The significant literature that addresses both of these moments is only touched on above. The value of separating these into two historical (and overlapping) moments is that there was first the withdrawal of public support of higher education in the 1970s and 1980s, coupled with legislation that made it easier for universities to privatize patents on research. These pressures led to universities marketing to new students and arranging research deals with private companies to come up with patentable products (Slaughter and Leslie 1997). The second phase is really tied to a political agenda in which universities, as a special kind of market industry, must be held accountable to their consumers while being efficient in the production of knowledge products. If the first phase of commodification brought the happy and narcissistic consumer marketplace to the university (Lasch 1979), the second phase has brought neoliberalism as a form of governmentality (Ong 2006). Breault and Callejo-Pérez cover some of this ground but without bringing in much of the literature or the details of the arguments. They choose to present a little context for prestige-seeking within a small book and not distract the audience from the main story.
The authors proceed to give us six very brief cases, three based on prestigious universities and three based on prestige-seeking universities. Again the choice here is to give us a brief case to see how prestige works, how prestige-seeking works, and sometimes how the two processes look very similar—the difference being greater amounts of capital (symbolic, cultural, and economic) among the prestigious universities and lesser amounts among the prestige-seeking, which means their strategies are often less successful and more wasteful of the institution’s limited resources.
The decision to go with a shorter and more economical text causes the cases to suffer a bit. Theoretically, Bourdieu’s notion of social space and “the field” might have been very helpful here. At times I felt like I was reading a Bourdieuian analysis with different concentrations of capital in different institutions and different habitus around prestige, what it meant, and how to get it (Bourdieu 1988). But that more theoretical analysis was missing from the cases. There was a nice discussion of how the strategies of individual faculty were often at odds with the institution. As institutions sought to increase their prestige, they left faculty under-supported. This lack of support led research-focused faculty to seek better jobs elsewhere, but the service- and teaching-focused faculty became trapped in institutions that did not value them.
Breault and Callejo-Pérez tell us early in the book that there are different routes to prestige. Ivy League universities have large endowments and much intellectual capital. But other prestigious universities have large football and basketball teams, and their sports programs bring in large amounts of money. And some universities have a combination of both patterns. By making the cases brief, some of the details about prestige—what makes prestige and how universities use it—get lost. And since each of the cases involves some difference of strategy in either using one’s prestige or seeking to accumulate it, it might have been helpful to have more analytical detail about each case. Finally, as Breault and Callejo-Pérez are in education programs, most of their examples come from education departments and schools and the faculties therein. Their examples are illuminating, but further analysis of how these forces work for other faculty might be helpful in their future work.
Breault and Callejo-Pérez conclude the book with a return to the need to support faculty, the negative impact that prestige-seeking has on curriculum, and the fact that we are working within a commodified and neoliberal landscape. These are really important points to return to—the distinction they made between reputation and prestige in the beginning of the book ought to be heavily underscored at the end. The authors detail how in one of the cases, the university did not seem to have a stated purpose, but was solely dedicated to prestige-seeking, which in the end is meaningless. This is an important point: even universities that have a clear mission oftentimes focus on prestige-seeking to the detriment of the programs they have, or could have, with good reputations.
It is easy to point out the limitations of a short book. But by focusing the discussion on the distinction between prestigious universities and prestige-seeking universities, Breault and Callejo-Pérez have raised a critical issue we all should be looking at in higher education. And while the marketplace and the forces of neoliberal governmentality would encourage prestige-seeking behaviors, the authors show that our efforts will not lead to prestige and may very well undermine the good programs we have.