80 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus average terms of service, compensation, gifts, and endowments. This chapter indicates that the prevailing form of administration and finance is a corporate model of organization, combined with a high degree of bureaucratization and financial control. Chapter 4 interprets degrees and curricula, both authentic and bogus, as well as courses, credits, honours, and licences. Faculty numbers and concerns are addressed in chapter 5. These include academic rank, qualifications and procedures for appointment, tenure, compensation and benefits, service, unions, and mobility. Teaching and questions related to the learning process, and students and student concerns are discussed in chapters 6 and 7. The final chapter, "Research and Public Service," records sources and appropriations for funded research, touches on political and legislative influences, and closes with a justification for continued commitment to public service and the concomitant maintenance of public support for institutions. A prodigious amount of information has been condensed so that the reader can understand the American higher education system and the more than three thousand universities, community colleges, and post-secondary institutions. Future editions could be improved, however, by more rigorous editorial standards and amendments in two areas. Typographical errors such as "intrustions" (p. 57), "utilty" (p. 127), and "Three Thousand Features" (p. 18) for the Carnegie Council's Final Report, Three Thousand Futures, could be corrected. In addition, alternatives could be used for masculine pronouns, thereby eliminating sexual bias. The consistent use of "he" for faculty and administrators may be either an accurate reflection of the current situation or an unfortunate example of the lexicon which supports continuing inequality in higher education. Despite these few weaknesses, the book is topical, current, balanced, and presents a comprehensive description of American higher education. It is particularly appropriate for a general audience and well worth consideration for an undergraduate class in higher education. Janice Newsom and Howard Buchbinder. The University Means Business: Universities, Corporations, and Academic Work. Toronto: Garamond Press, 1988, 103 pages. Reviewed by M. L. Skolnik. This book begins with the following quotation of a president of a Canadian university who was at the time Chairman of the Corporate-Higher Education Forum, an agency founded to foster cooperation between universities and the business community; "If you sat around the table [at a meeting of the university presidents and corporation presidents who belong to the Forum] and listened to the discussion and didn't know, you'd be hard pressed to know who was a university president and who was a corporation president." The authors find in this comment a chilling, but not unjustified, depiction of the identity toward which the Canadian university is rapidly moving in the late Twentieth Century. This book is both an analysis of the consequences of increased corporate-university cooperation and a 81 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus grim warning that without a major effort to construct and implement an alternative vision of the university, it will become nothing more than a mere adjunct to the corporation. In turgidly alarmist and Marxist prose, the authors warn that "by tying its creative energies to the needs of production through various funding arrangements and contractual relationships", the university will become integrated "via its academic workers, into the social process of production - the way in which production is organized within the framework of capitalist relations. Workers become a full-fledged commodity when harnessed to the needs of industry through the sale of their labour power." Diatribes against the intrusion of corporate influence into the university are readily available in faculty association newspapers and leftwing magazines, and if they were merely another such polemic, it would be of only marginal interest to most students of higher education. The authors do have something more than that to offer. They have done a good job of marshalling evidence on the technocratic designs of numerous corporate, government, and university opinion leaders, and on the nature of many recent corporate-university joint ventures. The implications of corporate-university interaction are examined within the framework of an original micro-analysis of trends in the organization of academic work. The chapter entitled, "The Intramural Struggle", which analyzes the relationships among faculty unions, senates, and administration, is a very useful contribution to the literature on university politics in Canada. The authors' strong anti-corporate bias does not get in the way of their attempt to examine the forces which have led universities to cozy up to corporations or preclude their sensitivity to issues of the university's social responsibility as publicly funded institutions to contribute to Canada's economic and technological development. The chief weakness of the book is its failure to counter visions of the university like those of the Forum or the Science Council of Canada with any alternative vision which could justify the independence of the university. The authors lament the diminution of faculty discretion over academic priorities and methods of work, but they fail to establish what social good is served by this discretion - other than it being pleasing to the professoriate. The obvious answer is that robust liberal education requires the university to have a considerable degree of independence from the designs of not only the corporate community, but other interest groups as well. By liberal education, I mean that which is concerned with liberating the mind and developing the full human potential through initiation into knowledge which is deemed to be intrinsically valuable and independent of the demands of a particular techno-economic and social structure. The authors, however, do not come across as friends of liberal education. They have almost nothing to say about it, except to confuse liberal education with liberal spending on education - and the two are most certainly not the same - and to wish for "an alternative vision to the liberal model". The alternative that they seem to favour is some sort of vaguely defined "polytechnic" vision of the university as an agent of social transformation. Thus, while rejecting corporate instrumentalism, they opt for another kind of instrumentalism which would also make the university 82 Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus handmaiden to forces external to it, just different ones than those of the corporation. Yet once the door to instrumentalism is opened, the economically and politically strongest candidate to push through that door is the technologically driven corporation which they abhor.