You might find these interesting discussions of universities as corporations: "In California, the main universities -- Berkeley and UCLA -- they're essentially

You might find these interesting discussions of universities as corporations: "In California, the main universities -- Berkeley and UCLA -- they're essentially Ivy League private universities -- colossal tuition, tens of thousands of dollars, huge endowment. General assumption is they are pretty soon going to be privatized, and the rest of the system will be, which was a very good system -- best public system in the world -- that's probably going to be reduced to technical training or something like that. The privatization, of course, means privatization for the rich [and a] lower level of mostly technical training for the rest. And that is happening across the country." (http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20110406.htm http://www.chomsky.info/talks/20110406.htm) "The growth of administrative work has directly resulted from introducing corporate management techniques. Invariably, these are justified as ways of increasing efficiency and introducing competition at every level. What they end up meaning in practice is that everyone winds up spending most of their time trying to sell things: grant proposals; book proposals; assessments of students’ jobs and grant applications; assessments of our colleagues; prospectuses for new interdisciplinary majors; institutes; conference workshops; universities themselves (which have now become brands to be marketed to prospective students or contributors); and so on." (http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars) (As for economics vs. politics, we may wonder if it's ideological to separate them.)