FINDING THOSE MARKET TESTS. Invisible Adjunct has weighed in on Stanley Fish's response to Congressional criticism, first noted on these pages here, where I focused on the role external labor markets play in disciplining the university. Invisible Adjunct puts rather precisely a different, yet related point: "The one point that I would query: as I read it, it's not so much that Fish's elitism undermines his argument as that his argument is underpinned by an elitism that will no longer fly with the public." That, dear readers, is where the market test still comes in, protestations contrary to "And on the matter of accountability, I think Fish does a bit of pandering of his own, invoking the spectre of college curricula determined by popular plebiscite in order to highlight the dangers of running the college as a business that responds to consumer demand" notwithstanding. Let's walk the cat backwards. In the absence of some kind of demand (from my earlier post, "we have not yet disposed of the hypothesis that creature comforts are cheaper than a prestige faculty as means to encouraging enrollments" still remains an open question) there is no university. The reason I focus on the failures of the universities is that those failures drive recruiters away from the job fairs, those graduates who get hired as symbolic analysts will lose their audiences (classes, congregations, readers, viewers, clients, you name it) and the students will find other ways to demonstrate their capabilities. (If you really want to worry, imagine internships without sophomore or junior standing. We used to call such things apprenticeships, and they ran for seven years.) Although the academy operates in part apart from the market, it cannot operate in complete isolation from it. I think Invisible Adjunct gets that. Problem: the following paragraph presupposes that there are some nonpecuniary positive externalities to a university degree: "Ultimately accountable in the sense that public institutions must serve, and must be seen to serve, some public mission and/or some idea of the public good. This is tricky to argue, the more so as some members of the broader public would use 'accountability' to undermine the very principles on which higher education in a liberal democracy must rest." Absent a sound core curriculum, there might be no such spillovers. (That was one of my observations here.)