Lee Smith offers an interesting idea, presuming what he calls "a dedication to the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge" on the part of private research universities.
That is a false premise, as any review of their library spending since 1970 will demonstrate. Universities' priority is not knowledge. It is the bottom line. They got rich by emphasizing profitability, as Veblen pointed out in THE HIGHER LEARNING IN AMERICA, 1918, followed by Nisbet in 1971, Shils in 1975, and President Eisenhower in his Farewell Address, 1961, "... a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity."
