It's a special day when the Wall Street Journal has something nice to say about Yale. In this case, they say good things about Rick Levin-- who deserves them, in my opinion. But the framework in which the praise is uttered conforms to the WSJ's all-encompassing scenario: universities are competitors in a market. Yale is a brand that must struggle and prevail. The main items in their list of laurels are the fact that Yale's endowment has grown immensely in the past decade or so, and that President Levin has worked hard to internationalize a university that at times mistook itself for the universe. (You've probably heard the story

about November 22, 1963, on the Yale campus. Somebody said: “The President's been shot!” Response: “Now why would anybody want to shoot Kingman Brewster?”)

The WSJ, in other words, verifies Bill Readings' diagnosis, in The University in Ruins: The university becomes a place of “excellence” where it doesn't much matter what we are excellent at doing, so long as we are perceived as being excellent. The budget and the scholarly activities are all just part of the brand, and the brand's mission is to achieve dominance in its market segment.

Had the WSJ tilted its head slightly differently and looked at the criteria that people inside universities respect, I think Yale would have still come out looking good, but differently. The purpose of all those billions, buildings, admissions officers, university presidents, and so on is to produce (a) scholars and (b) research outputs. In other words, a university is connected to an economy at one end-- the economy supports the university-- but it is connected to something else at the other. It transforms dollars into knowledge, more or less effectively. And so the WSJ journalist's reason for being interested in Yale-- described as “a venerable institution that, along with public and private peers, is vital to American prosperity”-- falls apart. The knowledge economy doesn't sit within the borders of any one country any more than the scholars trained at Yale do. Invoking “American prosperity” as the outcome of having good universities is a weak attempt to drag the internationalizing machinery of Yale and its sister institutions back into a national sandbox that the article already told us is not the relevant frame of reference. It does, however, reaffirm the authority of economics, whether or not that was the right thing to do.

I'll write again about “the university of prosperity.” Not that I'm opposed to money; but it does funny things to people.