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A new philosophy of higher education has taken hold in institutions around the world. Its supporters disavow the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake and argue that the only knowledge worth pursuing is that with more or less immediate market value. Every other kind of learning is downgraded, its budget cut. In Knowledge for Sale, Lawrence Busch challenges this market-driven approach. The rationale for the current thinking, Busch explains, comes from neoliberal economics, which calls for reorganizing society around the needs of the market. The market-influenced changes to higher education include shifting the cost of education from the state to the individual, turning education from a public good to a private good subject to consumer demand; redefining higher education as a search for the highest-paying job; and turning scholarly research into a competition based on metrics including number of citations and value of grants.

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"More than just a call to arms in the fight against the increasingly pervasive idea that higher education needs to be run like a business, this book lays out a plan for how the fight might be won. It is essential reading for anyone who believes that the only market that has any place in our institutions of learning is the marketplace of ideas." - Gregory A. Petsko, Arthur J. Mahon Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Weill Cornell Medical College and Cornell University

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Lawrence Busch is University Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Michigan State University and the author of Standards: Recipes for Reality (MIT Press)

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