LIKE NOBODY’S BUSINESS

Abstract

Universities are fascinating institutions. For almost 1,000 years, these corporations of teachers and scholars have been searching for knowledge and transmitting it. In carrying out this mission, universities are “things of unruly paradox”1 that operate as the birthplace and battlefield of ideas, constantly enlightening, challenging, solving, confounding, serving, criticizing, creating, reasoning, and frustrating both themselves and their stakeholders. And yet, focusing on my initial term above, universities are corporations too. In fact, universitas, the Latin root of the word, literally means “corporation” as in a company or guild.2 It’s odd, then, as institutions built on the very notion of knowing, that the people in and associated with universities know so little about them as corporations in the business-oriented sense of the word. That’s the charge I’m taking on in this book: to explain how the business of the university works, to provide a grounding in what people want to know and ought to know about how money really flows in and around these vital institutions.