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As Jamie's header makes clear, the "market" question is rhetorical,
not factual.  Is a university (or a hospital or another public sector
institution) really LITERALLY a marketplace?  No.  Does it have
certain features that are very like a marketplace?  Yes.

Rhetorically, when we take a term from one context and use it in
another, we are troping, using a metaphor.  The symbolic action of a
metaphor is to direct attention toward the features of the primary
subject (in this case, universities) that are shared by the 2nd term
of the metaphor (what Perelman calls a phoros, Richards a vehicle).
One responds to a metaphor by considering which of the cultural
commonplaces associated with the 2nd term might apply to the primary
subject.  (For a fuller version of what this paragraph says, see my
article on "Metaphor" in the _Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and
Composition_, ed. Theresa Enos.)

The marketplace metaphor directs attention to the ways in which
postsecondary education is like a stereotypical marketplace (which
means the metaphor is governed more by mythologies than realities of
"free market" economics--but that is a side issue).  Of course, this
means the metaphor also deflects attention from the ways in which
postsecondary education is unlike that marketplace.

The first danger is that people forget this is a metaphor and start
arguing it as a question of fact (i.e., in fact, is a university
literally a marketplace?)  This puts under erasure the rhetorical
question, i.e., how is our perception of what universities do
influenced by this metaphor? what attitudes/values do we import with
this metaphor? how does this metaphor influence our decisions?  It
puts under erasure how we might act differently if we (and our
students) used other metaphors, perhaps even metaphors that didn't
direct our attention to "bottom line" rationales.  Metaphors perhaps
that reminded us that, as one futurist economist by the name of Tom
Jones once put it, Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' comes with an
'invisible foot,'" i.e., if everyone follows his [sic] self-interest,
an "invisible hand" may in some sense maximize output (Adam Smith's
metaphor) for the system as a whole, but meanwhile an "invisible
foot" is stomping a whole bunch of "failures" into the dirt.

The "free market" metaphor has its uses (tho capitalist ideologues
tend to confuse freedom for investors, buyers, and sellers, with
political freedom, a.k.a. democracy--which was how all those brutal
dictators used to be logically included in the "free world"); it
directs our attention to certain pragmatic realities and issues of
individual freedom.  It also has its dangers.  The main thing I want
to say in this message is, whether you like this metaphor or not,
remember it is a metaphor, a term lifted rhetorically from its native
context and applied to another.

Rick Coe