American Institutions The Professor As Commodity

In the nineteenth century the academic man was shielded, at least in part, from the general transformation of labor into a commodity. In our own time, as professors Caplow and McGee demonstrate in their valuable and informative study, the academician tends increasingly to be treated as a commodity sold on the market—not this alone, to be sure, but still a commodity sold after much haggling and with impressive ceremonial and ritual accomplishments, though not necessarily in accordance with its use value.

The change is a striking one. Academicians of the past would have been repelled by the very title of this book, but few today would even understand the reasons for such a response. Much more than ever in the past, if we may trust the evidence accumulated by Caplow and McGee, the academy has become a marketplace in which the motives of pecuniary emulation (to use Veblen’s apt phrase) are often as dominant as in other American institutions.

“There is very little point,” write Caplow and McGee, “in trying to determine how good the man really is [when a professor is being considered for appointment] … What is important is what others in the discipline think of him, since that is, in la...