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We recognize that we live in an era of accountability, facing continued assessment. It is important that we are responsible for our actions and evaluate ourselves regularly. We need to learn how to use annual reviews and teaching evaluations to set personal objectives and to do it in a way that is transparent to both students ad colleagues. What we see going on in Texas, assessing the financial worth or impact of faculty, however, is another example of the worse excesses of the notion of the corporate university, where students are just customers and the driving force in everything is the financial bottom-line or the marketplace. It is why the list of books and articles about the corporate university grows daily, recently reflected in the set of articles about this academic model in the October 17 th issue of The Chronicle Review . This trend, in my estimation threatening the future of the university, is one reason I wrote The Demise of the Library School: Personal Reflections on Professional Education in the Modern Corporate University (Duluth, MN: Library Juice, 2010). I worry that the encroaching notion of the corporate university will push our schools to embrace goals or measurements that cause us to lose sight of many of the historic objectives of such schools. What I wrote is, as the title suggests, not a study but a set of personal observations – I just felt impelled to say some things worrying me about what our university homes are becoming and what this might do to our professional, scholarly, and other agendas. You can argue with all of my perspectives, but hopefully you will acknowledge that at least we need to be discussing the issues suggested by the corporate university. In an article about what is happening in Texas, Bill Peacock, vice president at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the group that developed the notion of the productivity spreadsheet, is described as acknowledging that “this approach could mean a radical reshaping of academia, with far more emphasis on filling students with practical information and less on intellectual pursuits, especially in the liberal arts.” At first glance this could be seen to affirm that the corporate model might be friendly to professional schools such as ours. But Peacock is also reported as being unconcerned about this: "Taxpayers of the state of Texas" should decide whether "they should be spending two years paying the salary of an English professor so he can write a book of poetry simply to add to the prestige of the university or the body of literature out there." The danger is how this thinking will extend to what we teach, choose to do research about, where and what to publish, and so forth. Increasingly observers about such trends are questioning why faculty are not resisting such developments or at least becoming engaged in them in order to help shape the means by which we are assessed and to determine just what are the details of our accountability to the university and society. Perhaps what we should ask is who gets to define what we mean by accountability? When they come and seek data from you to assess only the financial bottom-line of your work, will you just comply rather than try to engage in a reasoned dialogue about the worth of your scholarship, teaching, and service – the historic components of how we have argued for the university’s worth in society, namely the creation, dissemination, and preservation of knowledge. As for the assessment by Mr. Peacock – he just makes me want to go write some poetry. Richard J. Cox Professor, Archival Studies Chair, SIS Council