The New York Times All the World's a Campus
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"Imitating the companies they study, some of the business schools are spending millions of dollars to set up satellite operations around the globe. The schools' rationale for expansion mimics the goals of international companies as well: they hope to find new sources of revenue, establish a brand name in far-away places and learn lessons about how other markets function."

redux [08.03.00]
The New York Times Columbia Sets Pace in Profiting Off Research
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"When Fredric D. Price, the president of a nutritional-supplements company, sought a partner to create an online information company, NutritionU.com, he approached a Columbia University professor, Dr. Richard J. Deckelbaum.

He hit pay dirt.

Some academics might have run the other way, concerned about the motives and standards in the emerging commercial market for cyber education. But Dr. Deckelbaum, director of Columbia's Institute of Human Nutrition, viewed the Internet as a way to reach a wider population.

Columbia was interested, too. The venture fit neatly into its strategy to turn more of its intellectual capital -- the knowledge, research and teaching of its professors -- into financial capital."

redux [05.09.00]
The Standard A Brand Called Stanford
"For decades, Stanford University has served as an intellectual incubator to students and faculty who have gone on to found such Silicon Valley icons as Hewlett-Packard (HWP) , Silicon Graphics (SGI) and Yahoo. Now Stanford has hatched a startup of its own."

"On Tuesday, the university launched its first for-profit venture, an Internet medical company called e-Skolar. The startup will market an online information service for physicians called Stanford Skolar, M.D."

""We've gotten some income from our associations [with Stanford-inspired companies] but it's minimal to the value created." Determined to profit from its intellectual property, Stanford formed e-Skolar, taking a majority ownership stake."

Netfuture Who's Killing Higher Education? (or is it suicide?)
"A growing consensus holds that new information technologies foretell the end of higher education as we have known it. I suspect this is true. Its truth, however, is not that the technologies are positively revolutionizing education. Rather, what we are watching is more like the end -- the final perfection and dead-end extreme -- of the old regime's shortcomings."

"All this worries a growing contingent of educators, who fear the corporation's "crushing solicitude". (The phrase is William F. Buckley's which he applied many years ago to the ministrations of centralized government.) I share this fear, but it seems to me that the more fundamental issue often goes unnoted: our changing notions about what education is make it inevitable that business and industry should step into the picture aggressively. If you want efficient delivery of effective facts and procedures, then business -- already attuned to such computationally rigorous training -- will far outperform the university.

In other words, having increasingly accepted their role as training grounds for business -- which is what the information-transfer model of education implies -- universities are now finding that business is better situated to train its own employees than schools are. At best the universities will simply hire themselves out to corporations.

NPR Stanford's Own Internet Company
"NPR's Chris Arnold reports that today Stanford University in California is announcing the launch of its own internet company, e-skolar."