Good-bye, Mr. Chips (Part 1)

In a news article in The Scientist titled "Managers on a Mission,"¹ I learned that my long-time fear had come to pass: Mr. Chips is really dead. Although his illness, initiated in part by managed care and declining availability of National Institutes of Health research dollars need not have been terminal, the adoption of mission-based management by university medical schools across this nation promoted his demise. In this article, Robert Jones, executive director of the American Association of Medical Colleges, was quoted as saying that "medical schools are involved in several different businesses." Jones then delivered the coup de grace to the defenseless Mr. Chips by unabashedly and categorically stating that both research and educating students are business enterprises. I've known for a while that the halls of medical academia have become corridors of power.

Now I'm being told that the acquisition of knowledge for the sake of knowledge...