------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (February 2007)

Donald R. Stabile, _Economics, Competition and Academia: An 
Intellectual History of Sophism versus Virtue_. Cheltenham, UK: 
Edward Elgar, 2007. vii + 148 pp. $90 (hardcover), ISBN: 
978-1-84720-236-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Donald E. Frey, Department of Economics, Wake 
Forest University.


In this book, Donald Stabile gives the highlights of a two 
millennia-long debate between market-driven models of higher 
education and market-sheltered models. Tracing the debate back to the 
Greeks, Stabile equates the market-oriented approach with the 
Sophists, who taught the practical subjects students were willing to 
pay for, and who measured success by their own incomes. The 
market-sheltered approach, Stabile argues, was promoted by Plato and 
Aristotle, whose wealth exempted them from reliance on students' fees 
and who sought to teach what made for virtue. Stabile suggests that 
the "virtue" school relied on endowments of one sort or another to 
insulate education from market pressures toward more utilitarian 
subjects. Stabile uses the term "endowment" in a somewhat elastic 
manner, including, for example, personal wealth in the case of Plato 
and, in the present era, state support as an equivalent of endowment.

Stabile is an historian of economic ideas and he concentrates on 
thinkers (including groups, such as the authors of the 1828 Yale 
Report) who articulated or defended particular models of education. 
Using the poles of "sophism" (market-driven and utilitarian 
education) and "virtue" (market-sheltered and non-utilitarian 
education), Stabile analyzes where various thinkers and educational 
institutions have been located on the spectrum between the two. The 
analysis is richer than merely considering how higher education is 
financed (tuition fees versus endowment earnings); it includes issues 
of motivating students and faculty, the nature of curriculum, 
divisions between the responsibilities of faculty and administrators, 
and how education relates to its culture.

Curriculum is central to the sophism-virtue debate, as Stabile sees 
it. The sophist curriculum would be pragmatic, with much student 
choice, in order to appeal to tuition-paying students. In modern 
terms, there would be many electives, and this would pose the problem 
of assuring sufficient demand to justify offering those electives. 
Conversely, what he calls a virtue-oriented curriculum would offer a 
core of required courses deemed by faculty to be essential for moral 
development. This was the model of colonial and early 
nineteenth-century denominational colleges, which could offer fewer 
courses and keep faculties small. As Stabile indicates, very few 
American universities in the post-1800 era have been pure polar 
models of sophism or virtue. Most have relied upon multiple sources 
of funding, including tuition and fees, endowment returns, state 
support, and current donations. And, many university curricula 
combine elements of sophism and virtue.

Though Stabile starts with the Greeks, and gives consideration to 
pre-Enlightenment thinkers and universities, his main efforts are 
concentrated on the period after Adam Smith. Following Smith, 
Stabile's focus is predominantly on the American scene, although he 
does pay attention to Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, and Alfred Marshall. 
The American educational theorists considered were not all 
economists, but include figures such as Benjamin Rush, Francis 
Wayland, Charles Eliot, and Abraham Flexner.

Stabile argues that education reflected trends in the culture, and 
gives special focus to the culture of the rising corporate 
capitalism. Charles Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades 
prior to 1909, revised its curriculum in directions that fit the 
ethos of capitalism, keeping an eye on what the market demanded. 
Eliot ultimately approved a graduate business school to serve the 
need of business for trained leadership. This strategy implied that 
the university would grow, just as business had, by serving the needs 
of business and adopting the methods of business. On the other hand, 
in some areas, Eliot pushed back against the capitalist ethos. He 
made sure his businessmen-trustees did not meddle in curriculum 
matters, nor think of faculty as they would think of employees. And 
he was emphatic that the profit motive should not drive the 
university. By Stabile's categories, Eliot exhibited tendencies 
associated with sophism in some sectors yet resisted such tendencies 
in other arenas.

Eliot is not the only figure in this book to produce ideas consistent 
with both the "virtue" _and_ the "sophist" approaches. In Stabile's 
telling of it, even the rise of the business school in American 
higher education was not a pure case of the triumph of sophism, for 
their funding was often provided from large endowments; and the 
faculties aimed to impart virtue to students by creating business 
codes of ethics and placing liberal arts courses in the business 
curriculum. Indeed, Stabile's general conclusion is that "virtue has 
retained its primary place in academia in spite of academia's being 
surrounded by the culture of capitalism [i.e. sophism]" (p. 124).

Throughout the book, Stabile makes the case that even the thinkers 
most committed to sophism respected boundaries (defined by their 
notions of virtue) beyond which they would not push their ideas. In 
the end, we find that influential thinkers and educational 
institutions seem to have been pulled in both directions, ending with 
characteristics of both sophism and virtue. Does this mean that 
Stabile's sophism and virtue are not the best reference points 
against which to survey higher education?

The reader departs from this book with a reasonable idea of what 
sophism means. However, throughout the book, virtue remains 
ill-defined. In fact, this reader came to suspect that -- at least as 
Stabile tells the story -- "virtue" has little independent content of 
its own, and simply plays the role of a foil -- that is, 
"not-sophist." Part of the reason for this is that the norms of 
virtue have changed: they were one thing to the ancient Greeks, 
another in the Catholic middle ages, yet another in early Protestant 
America, and finally another in secular twentieth-century 
universities. Stabile is aware of this shifting of the meaning of 
virtue, and the implied moral relativism, though he writes only 
sparingly about it. Summarizing a proponent of business education, 
Stabile makes the point: "Once academia had become secularized ... 
what was the definition of virtue? ... Business faculty could lay the 
same claim of virtue as did liberal arts faculty. With no intrinsic 
standard of virtue such as Christianity held, all disciplines could 
claim a privileged place" (p. 114). In short, virtue had been 
rendered meaningless by secular moral relativism.

Stabile makes the brave claim that "the Christian ethos has persisted 
despite the secularization of academia and the influence of 
capitalism" (p. 123). Yet, he does not develop this claim. Indeed, 
even in his discussion of earlier, presumably more Christian, eras, 
Stabile is not very detailed in his discussion of what virtue would 
mean in the curriculum of a Christian university or college. 
Functionally, as used in this book, "virtue" seems to stand simply 
for whatever tendencies in higher education cannot be reduced to 
utilitarian motives (as noted, virtue seems to be a foil, an 
anti-sophism with little content of its own). Even in the Christian 
context, when Stabile gives virtue some content, its meaning is 
simply anti-sophism: to avoid "unnatural" acquisitiveness.

A component of Stabile's failure to define virtue as understood by 
different eras is his lack of distinction between Catholic education 
and Protestant education that dominated the American colonies and 
continued into the nineteenth century. For example, Stabile's 
description of Puritan education boils down to the statement that 
Puritans "were firm believers in education as a way for humans to 
understand sin and avoid it" (p. 45). He does not mention the nature 
of the Puritan intellectual culture described at length in many books 
by Perry Miller in the mid 1900s, the Puritan commitment to empirical 
science and their adoption of the scientifically oriented curriculum 
of Peter Ramus, or their fascination with the pioneering educational 
ideas of John Amos Comenius. In short, there are different 
perspectives on even Christian "virtue" that Stabile fails to 
consider, which would have enriched the book. Protestant theories of 
education might even have allowed pragmatic subjects to be integrated 
in a curriculum as a matter of theological principle instead of as a 
matter of sophism.

This concern aside, I found this book well worth reading. Even if the 
categories Stabile has chosen to summarize higher-education 
strategies are not ideal, he raises an issue that has a long history 
and remains important. Today, some of the most contentious debates in 
faculty meetings of liberal arts colleges are waged over proposals to 
reduce "core" requirements or to add a major that might appear "too 
vocational." In dealing with the educational ideas of major 
economists, Stabile is also particularly good at showing how their 
general economic ideas had implications for higher education. And, in 
fact, his short sketches of the economists' general ideas are useful 
summaries for anyone.


Donald E. Frey has published in the economics of education and in the 
history of economic thought. His current work is a history of 
America's economic moralists.

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