Edwin M. Young

``The preoccupation with acquiring Prestige, once embraced at the highest administrative levels, gets trumpeted far and wide on the wings of magnificent rhetoric as a commendable, even noble pursuit. The party line trickles down through deans and department heads. Professors, wanting to eat, are quick to take the hint: Bring in that grant money and crank out those research papers. Or leave....

One casualty is today's students. Don't blame them for their overly job-centered attitudes. They soak up what they see...

Another casualty is the overwhelming flood of marginal technical scholarship... Quality is out and quantity is in. Slice the baloney as thin as you can. Remember, the reward system is that numbers game: What matters is how many publications you get out the door.

This paper pollution also winds up choking the very peer-review system that is supposed to pass judgment on the merit of research papers submitted to professional journals.

... for the Prestige focused university, the place of research has been inflated far out of proportion to less glamorous or less revenue-generating tasks.''

__Edwin M. Young in Notre Dame Magazine, Winter 1987-88.

Rudyard Kipling

``When ... you go out into the `battle of life', you will be confronted by an organized conspiracy which will try to make you believe that the world is governed by the idea of wealth for wealth's sake, and that all means which lead to the accumulation of that wealth are, if not laudable, at least expedient. Those of you who have fitly imbibed the spirit of our University ... will violently resent that thought, but you will live and eat and move and have your being in a world dominated by that thought. Some of you will probably succumb to the poison of it.

... Sooner or later you will see some man to whom the idea of wealth as mere wealth does not appeal, to whom the methods of amassing that wealth do not interest, and who will not accept money if you offer it to him at a certain price.

At first you will be inclined to laugh at this man... I suggest that you watch him closely, for he will demonstrate to you that money dominates everybody except the man who does not want money. You may meet that man on your farm, in your village, or in your legislature. But be sure that, whenever and wherever you meet him, his little finger will be thicker than your loins. You will go in fear of him; he will not go in fear of you. You will do what he wants; he will not do what you want. You will find that you have no weapon in your armoury with which you can attack him; no argument with which you can appeal to him. Whatever you gain, he will gain more.

I would like you to study that man. I would like you better to be that man, because ... it doesn't pay to be obsessed by the desire of wealth for wealth's sake.''

__Rudyard Kipling, speech at McGill University, October 1907.

Mario Puzo

"I made him an offer he couldn't refuse."

__Spoken by Vito Corleone in Puzo's The Godfather.