A married man with a family will do anything for money," Talleyrand is supposed to have said. Lawrence C. Soley's research indicates that the French statesman's quip has wider application. American universities seem willing to accept money for just about any purpose, professorial venality seems to have few limits, and conflicts of interest seem to be widespread. Soley's thesis is that corporations and wealthy individuals are systematically corrupting U.S. universities and professors with money whose main purpose is to enhance the interests of those who are giving the money. It is intended to finance research that will augment corporate profitability, to justify the dominance of the free enterprise ethos, and to train students to be useful employees of transnational corporations. Soley, who teaches communications at Marquette University, shows that some academics do nicely for themselves, collecting patents, stock options, consultancies, and lecture fees. None feeds more voraciously from the private trough than many medical researchers and professors of business administration, but some social scientists also get their dippers in. Administrators are well-rewarded, especially if they have some link to fund-raising. Most professors in the humanities, on the other hand, unable to attract money from the corporate sector, are the poor cousins of the academic world. The main losers, Soley argues, are taxpayers, some of whose money gets used to enrich the feed, students, who get little or no attention from academic "superstars," and badly-paid part-timers and graduate students who do much of the actual teaching. Academic principles suffer under the weight of corporate funding, Soley writes. He spends next to no time discussing what these principles are, however. For example, although he claims that academic freedom is reduced, he does not indicate how. Indeed, it is unclear what he believes academic freedom to be. His suggestions for change are brief and almost perfunctory, as though he expects few readers to take them seriously. Soley is occasionally guilty of overgeneralization and hyperbole. More disappointing is that he fails to found his often-valid and damning critique in a historical analysis of U.S. universities. In The Higher Learning in America (1918), Thorstein Veblen was already discussing some of the issues that concern Soley. The "corporate takeover" of American higher education has been going on for a long time. Soley's study is a useful muck-raking guide to present-day abuses.

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