The end of this semester marks the end of thirty years of law teaching for me. Indeed, I have spent the majority of my fifty-eight years in the academy, with a short exception on Wall Street as a lawyer. I have been a high school student, college student, graduate student, professional school student, high school teacher, college teacher, law school teacher, and university administrator. In those years I have written literally hundreds of lectures on subjects practical and esoteric. I have attended countless faculty meetings and suffered through endless academic debates with little point and eaten hundreds of pounds of lunch meat accompanied by stale potato chips. By to what end?

Increasingly, KU and other major universities “sell” themselves to the public as economic engines fueled by faculty research which brings in investment dollars and supports industry. Internally, we measure the success of faculty by how much money they generate through external grants. Our “best” faculty are those who generate the greatest funding . Every faculty member, regardless of subject taught or research conducted is pushed to generate income. We’ve even reached the point at which we finance bonds to build laboratories backed by the promise of increased faculty grant generation. We have given a whole new meaning to the old cliche that a university is a “marketplace” of ideas.” I can almost here the research administrators now, sitting at their tables at a conference in some exotic locale yelling: “come and get it now. Ideas for sale. Three for the price of two.”

It’s utter hypocrisy to attack the money-centered culture of the Athletic Association when we keep quiet about the very same phenomenon infesting the halls of our academic buildings. But there are some of us who still believe that universities are not simply research institutes, whose success is to be measured in dollars and cents generated. Some of us still ask what a university is for and answer: it is a place to teach students how to live good and productive lives.

More next time.