March 5 in The New York Times: Arizona closer to allowing students “with a concealed weapons permit — limited to those 21 and older — to carry their firearms at public colleges and universities.” Pushed by a state senator who half-jokingly described herself as a “right-wing wacko,” the bill is the latest attempt to use the tragedies at Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois to have us all holster up a firearm.

The idea is not silly or idiotic as much as it is truly dangerous. Would you want to be the person who had to explain to parents that their child had just been shot because a classmate “thought he had a gun”? Think about the dynamics — and the politics — of what happens when guns are not just allowed but welcomed into the classroom.

Higher-education reformers are often of two minds when the talk turns to markets. Most don’t like markets, arguing that much that is wrong with higher education starts and ends with the commercialism and unbridled pursuit of economic advantage that have accompanied the academy’s embrace of competitive markets. The most outraged even have a word for what has transpired: commodification.

Part snarl, part slogan, part technical term — it is the process by which markets transform educational experiences into educational commodities or products —commodification is the sure sign that the nation’s colleges and universities have gone astray. Money matters too much — values hardly at all. Students have been transformed into customers. Faculty have been told to become entrepreneurs, which is just a step above being money-grubbing ambulance chasers. The academy, which was once venerated as a...

For more than a quarter century now the major force for change in American higher education has been the emergence of a linked set of highly competitive markets for undergraduates, for both full- and part-time students pursuing professional masters degrees, and for federal and associated research dollars. In pursuit of the funds and cachet these markets provide, often in abundance, colleges and universities have changed their priorities and altered how they distribute power and authority. Put another way, 35 years of market competition have recast the financial underpinnings of both public and private higher education.

The rules have changed. Traditional values have been eclipsed. While faculty with direct access to research and entrepreneurial funding now have more freedom and autonomy than ever, the same cannot be said of the faculty as a collective whole. On most campuses...

I spent most of last year commuting between the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, and Northern Illinois University, where I was helping to develop a comprehensive academic plan. The commute was horrible, the experience exhilarating. A great university often starved for funds and never sure it would get the respect it deserves was reaching out — to all its constituencies, all of its neighbors, and to a world that had made northern Illinois a true global portal. It was a process without cant supervised by a planning committee whose members knew their institution and what it was capable of. Now those truly good people are consumed by a tragedy that is beyond comprehension, beyond purpose, and certainly beyond planning.

There is little I can do to lessen their pain. But I can — and do — wonder when are we going to stop asking whether the shooter had taken his medicine and instead...

Yesterday’s New York Times made it official — front page, Sunday edition, above the fold, color picture — American higher education has gone global. To the Times, it is a veritable “gold rush” as American institutions of nearly every stripe join the parade of universities opening branch campuses (actually outlets is a better descriptor) around the world.

What these universities are after, including the most prestigious among them, is an international strategy that feeds their home campuses, providing them students, revenue and visibility. And indeed, most programs of international education are designed to do just that. Among lesser institutions, this need “to bring the cash home” is transparent. Programs and campuses are established abroad to provide credentials that are fully recognized in the home institution’s country of origin. The students pay less than students at...

I was asked recently by Ron Daniels, Penn’s Provost, whom I thought the real winners would be in the kind of flat world Tom Friedman writes about. I told him the institutions that succeeded would be those that became “flat-world contrarians.” Flourishing as a successful contrarian requires both an understanding and, on some level, an embrace of what is being opposed. True contrarians are seldom curmudgeons. Rather than endlessly complaining, a contrarian university and its faculty would have to say and mean something like, “We’re an institution that lets you embrace the connectivity a flat world promises. We’re your anchor, one of those special places that is in but not wholly part of this world.”

A flat world-contrarian’s future would depend on its ability to give people something to hang on to, a mooring or anchor that would let them lean out without falling off the merry-go-round....

OK — so going global in a flat world requires, among other things, a fundamental lessening of the importance attached to physical place and niche brands. Most global enterprises are multinational networks of producers and service providers sending to market highly standardized goods and services. In an era of globalization not only a rose is a rose is a rose, but a Toyota is a Toyota is a Toyota, whether it is assembled in the United States or Southeast Asia or Europe from parts manufactured in a large array of countries. Products with the same names and the same brand identities look, feel, even smell the same worldwide. What is true of manufacturing is equally true of banking, fast foods, consulting, and retailing. With remarkably little variation the templates are all the same.

What would a global educational network look like? Technology would be king. Products and services —...

Spurred by the publication of Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat, much of American higher education has convinced itself that relevance and prosperity means going global! It seems to me, however, that the more likely outcome of an increasingly flat world is a global marketplace in which American colleges and universities, as presently configured, find themselves increasingly disadvantaged.

To understand why, it helps to strip “globalization” of some of its romanticism. An enterprise or industry can be said to be global if its transactions are transparent, its products are both standardized and widely distributed without reference to national boundaries, and its prices are set in fully convertible currencies. In global enterprises both time and space come to mean less and less. It is a world without places to hide, no cultural sanctuaries, no golden ponds on which to drift in...

You might miss it. Tucked into then end of Paul Basken’s story in the Chronicle of February 1, 2008 is an acknowledgment by Charles Miller, Chair of the Spellings Commission, that the campaign to make accreditation a federally assisted process for extracting greater accountability from the nation’s colleges and universities has come to an end. By all accounts, the renewal of the Higher Education Act will use Senate language “giving colleges the authority to set the terms of their own academic evaluations.” To be sure, Miller was not happy with this outcome, suggesting that the fight to impose tougher standards will now be waged in state capitals. “The governors are going to wake up one day,” Basken reports Miller as saying, “and say, ‘What are these people in Atlanta and Chicago and those places doing telling me what my institution should do? We own them.’” But the time,...

The fat is in the fire.

Last week’s reports on endowment returns for the nation’s wealthiest colleges and universities has made all but certain that higher education’s endowment practices are going to receive intensive scrutiny. The letters to the institutions with the 136 biggest endowments have already been sent, requesting them to supply the Senate Finance Committee with detailed information as to how they set their prices, award financial aid, and determine how much cash they draw from their endowments to fund their educational and research programs.

Organized higher education is sure to respond — suggesting that the subject is horribly complex, that it is always important to put money away for future emergencies, and that those outside of higher education really don’t understand the true purposes of higher education’s endowments.

I have a suggestion for those who will...