Academe’s Prestige Problem - The Chronicle of Higher Education

""The university is a technology," Andrew Piper and Chad Wellmon write in their recent essay on academic publishing. "Let’s treat it like one." This is an intriguing point. The university and its daily operations certainly do function techno-logically: They are and they perform well-defined means for achieving certain ends. What these ends are, as Piper and Wellmon point out, depends on the specific nature of the apparatus itself, as well as the ways it functions with the broader machinery of society."