Risks and Rewards of Academic Capitalism and the Effects of Presidential Leadership in the Entrepreneurial University

American Universities are currently facing a multitude of new, critical issues that impact their core structures, threaten their traditional missions, and could affect their very existence, as they are known. The authors quoted above are a sampling of many who recognize the profound changes that are taking place in the environment in which American Universities at all levels are trying to find their way. Universities are struggling to balance their exploration of financial support with their traditional core tenets of teaching and search for knowledge. Clark (1998, 2000, 2004, 2005) has researched and written extensively on this issue. Clark has identified four key converging trends that create ever-increasingly turbulent university environments: Demands for participation change student entry from elite to mass to universal. The growing entitlement of young people to receive more education after secondary schooling also now leads toward a lifelong entitlement for both repeated professional retraining and cultural enrichment that extends into their retirement years. More occupations exact requirements of knowledge and skill not provided by secondary education. The highknowledge fields, changing faster than people are able to change their skills, lay their claim on universities and colleges for up-to-date education and training. The needs of the labor force cannot be denied. Government and the private sector increasingly exhort universities to assist them in solving societal problems as broad as poverty and poor health and as specific as city charter reform and local traffic control, with special emphasis on speeding economic and technological progress. Knowledge growth, I maintain, has become the most troubling trend of all. The globalization of knowledge propels its growth at an accelerating pace, rattling universities to their very foundations (Clark 2000). This paper explores one significant impact of these trends: the search for ongoing, stable funding of universities, their faculties and programs, and the emergence of an entrepreneurial approach as a proposed solution. First, the theoretical foundations of academic capitalism and transactional ver1.