Customer Reviews

Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace

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"Knowledge & Money" is a comprehensive, but long read! You should really love the concept of how research institutions have become profit centers at the expense of tax payers to appreciate its insights. It is an eye opening account of how the education industry has gone from "learning for the sake of learning" to the selling of education to the highest bidder. A real world treatise on how education, the last bastion of morality, has become a part of the marketing mix for corporate profits.

Edward Brown
Core Edge Image & Charisma Institute, Inc.

This book is not as hyperbolic as others touching on the same themes It is more measured and thorough across a range of contentious themes defining the university-industry interface. Readers familiar with work by Bloom, Nussbaum and Slaughter and Leslie (to mention a few) will be familiar with the wailings of liberal arts protectionists. Gieger is refreshing unemotive about such issues. His concerns are teasing out the expression and impact of competition and consumerism in the universities over students and research.

It is a book replete with interesting and arresting stats and arguments, and I won't pretend to do justice to it here. However, his analysis of the connection between student retention rates, inter university competition and student consumerism will resonate with most academics' experiences of their teaching environment. Interestingly, Gieger also mulls over the growing disconnection of research institutes from the educational core mission of universities. The periphery and centre are no longer in communion - a point becoming more obvious by the day. As he points out, criticism that classroom instruction is 'falling behind' is grounded largely in the mistaken supposition that periphery and core are in communion. The weakest part of the book, in my opinion the main blemish, is the last chapter dealing with universities and the markets. It is a bit vague and rambling with the the odd dollop of personal judgement thrown into the mix. For instance, Gieger asserts that the research market is 'beautifully efficient' (p 249). Not everyone would agree with this statement nor that efficiency equals either value for money nor utility. He does conclude this chapter by upbraiding the universities for not investing heavily enough in teaching, and not emphasising that a degree of insulation from commercial activity is desirable. Nevertheless, the chapter is composed of a lot of sections beginning, Firtsly, Secondly, Thirdly, ... lending a list structure to the text suggesting a hurried approach that jars with the rest of the work.

Overall, I found this book informative and in the main lively. It is not prose on a par with some of the more polemical writers in the field but well worth reading nevertheless.