Academic Prestige and the Material Equipment In the course of the preceding chapter it has appeared that the introduction of business principles into university policy has had the immediate and ubiquitous effect of greatly heightening the directorate's solicitude for a due and creditable publicity, a convincing visible success, a tactful and effectual showing of efficiency reflected in an uninterrupted growth in size and other tangible quantitative features. This is good policy as seen from the point of view of competitive business enterprise. In competitive business it is of the gravest importance to keep up the concern's prestige, or "good will." Abusiness concern so placed must be possessed of such prestige as will draw and hold a profitable traffic; otherwise the enterprise is in a precarious case. For the objective end and aim of business enterprise is profitable sales, or the equivalent of such sales if the concern is not occupied with what would strictly be called sales. The end sought is a net gain over costs; in effect, to buy cheap and sell dear. The qualities that count as of prime consequence in business enterprise, therefore, particularly in such business enterprise as has to do with many impressionable customers, are the salesmanlike virtues of effrontery and tact. These are high qualities in all business, because their due exercise is believed to bring a net return above the cost of the goods to the seller, and, indeed, above their value to the buyer. Unless the man in competitive business is able, by force of these businesslike aptitudes, to get something more than he gives, it is felt that he has fallen short of the highest efficiency. So the efficient salesman, and similarly the efficiently managed business concern, are enabled to add to their marketable goods an immaterial increment of "prestige value," as some of the economists are calling it. Amargin of prepossessions or illusions as to their superior, but intangible and inexpensive, utility attaches to a given line of goods because of the advertiser's or salesman's work, -- work spent not so much on the goods as on the customer's sensibilities.
In case these illusions of superior worth are of an enduring character, they will add an increment of such intangible utility also to goods or other marketable items subsequently to be offered by the same concern; and they can be added up as a presumptive aggregate and capitalized as intangible assets of the business concern in question. Such a body of accumulated and marketable illusions constitute what is known as "good-will," in the stricter sense of the term. The illusions in question need, of course, not be delusions; they may be well or ill founded; for the purpose in hand that is an idle question.
The most familiar and convincing illustrations of such good will are probably those afforded by the sales of patent medicines, and similar proprietary articles of household consumption; but intangible values of a similar nature are involved in nearly all competitive business. They are the product of salesmanship, not of workmanship; and they are useful to the seller, not to the buyer. They are useful for purposes of competitive gain to the businessman, not for serviceability to the community at large, and their value to their possessor lies in the differential advantage which they give to one seller as against another. They have, on the whole, no aggregate value or utility. From the point of view of the common good, work and expenditure so incurred for these competitive purposes are bootless waste.
Under compulsion of such precedents, drawn from the conduct of competitive business, publicity and "goodwill" have come to take a foremost place in the solicitude of the academic directorate. Not that this notoriety and prestige, or the efforts that go to their cultivation, conduce in any appreciable degree to any ostensible purpose avowed, or avowable, by any university.
These things, that is to say, rather hinder than help the cause of learning, in that they divert attention and effort from scholarly workmanship to statistics and salesmanship. All that is beyond cavil. The gain which so accrues to any university from such an accession of popular illusions is a differential gain in competition with rival seats of learning, not a gain to the republic of learning or to the academic community at large; and it is a gain in marketable illusions, not in serviceability for the ends of learning or for any other avowed or avowable end sought by the universities. But as competitors for the good-will of the unlettered patrons of learning the university directorates are constrained to keep this need of a reputable notoriety constantly in mind, however little it may all appeal to their own scholarly tastes.
It is in very large part, if not chiefly, as touches the acquirement of prestige, that the academic work and equipment are amenable to business principles, -- not overlooking the pervasive system of standardization and accountancy that affects both the work and the equipment, and that serves other purposes as well as those of publicity; so that "business principles" in academic policy comes to mean, chiefly, the principles of reputable publicity. It means this more frequently and more consistently than anything else, so far as regards the academic administration, as distinguished from the fiscal management of the corporation.
