This has to be one of the saddest books I’ve read in a while. It’s beautifully ironic. This book comes along and laments of the conflicts of interests with the marriage of universities and business while I am learning to embrace that I can love to have money.

I graduated from the University of Southern California and had a sense that something was amiss in the university system. Back then, I saw a university that catered strongly to the football program and felt like I was getting the scraps. The football program brought in the money and with the latest successes some immeasurable advertising.

However, there was an uneasy truce of advancing education and earning money. A university gets all excited about a new corporate sponsor giving millions to a department. But what if the corporate sponsor stipulates that the money be spent on research for the advancement of the sponsor’s own products? Or that any breakthroughs from the research would be considered the assets of the sponsor’s? And what happens when a professor mentoring graduate students is an owner of a private company?

In the former scenario, the research would have a STRONG affinity toward saying something positive about the sponsor’s product. What department would say something bad about their sponsor even if research says so? There’s statistics that would be some bias. In the second scenario, the spirit of research/education in a university environment is stymied and looks more like competing departments in a business or competing businesses. Instead of open sharing of ideas at the local coffeehouse, students are making fake notes to disguise their research from each other. In the final scenario, we may have a professor who only supports a thesis that supports his stock portfolio.

I recommend the book for anyone who is in the process of higher education or thinking of going in that direction. It could turn your head. There’s a whole lot of research and data in this book that began to numb my brain. I give the book 4 stars because it was difficult to read – perhaps more because of the revelation of the corruption of higher education. It will make a lot of you sick. ( )

The author builds up a case that the modern research universities are being corrupted by the profit motive. She argues that corporate investment in university based research is creating a scenario in which professors can no longer be considered as objective seekers of the truth but rather will only divulge information that is beneficial to their sponsors. The book raises many concerns that I believe are valid but Ms Washburn's solutions to the problems are not credible. She proposes the creation of yet another large quasi governmental organization that oversees ALL intellectual property created by public research. There are surely better solutions than this. Nonetheless, it is a thought provoking read, especially to anyone who is involved in higher education. ( )