"What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?" asked Columbia's Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. "There is more and more reason to think: less and less," he answered.

In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.

Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces--social, political, and institutional--dismantling the...