The Shifting Frontiers of Academic Decision Making, edited by Peter Eckel and published by the American Council on Education, explores the intersection of academic decision making with contemporary, cutting-edge challenges for which no simple solution exists.

The book features a chapter by Duke CE's Jared Bleak—"Charging into the Market:  Governance Challenges Created by Commercial Activities."

That chapter explores academic decision making in for-profit subsidiaries created to market and deliver education. In these organizations, often seen as hybrids of universities and businesses, revenue generation is one of the key goals. To many traditional university faculty and academic purists, these organizations are the embodiment of destructive trends at work in the academy. In addition to attempting to leverage the curriculum for explicit monetary gain, they can be perceived to challenge faculty prerogative over curricular decisions and change the ground rules by which such decisions are made. The chapter draws upon several case studies of both successful and failed efforts of academic commercialization to illustrate the dynamics of decision making in this environment. The chapter pursues the important and timely question of whether it is possible for higher education to do business like a business—a trend afoot in the academy for good or ill—and still retain core academic values and cultures.