“American higher education—much envied, once seemingly impregnable—has found itself settling into a deep funk,” writes Edward J. K. Gitre. “Suffering from plummeting endowments and overextended commitments, institutions everywhere are having to make hard, pragmatic concessions to fiscal exigencies.” In response, that privatization of public universities is accelerating, though “no one can conceive of its long-term unintended consequences.”