Industrializing Our Universities

“The learned and imaginative life is a way of living and is not an article of commerce,” wrote the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead in 1929. Fifty years later, in commending an industrial associates program to the Yale faculty, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the university’s president, declared that educational institutions, “an integral part of the private sector,” must promote their “natural alliances” with the business community.

The difference bet...