1 2005 The University as Business A number of colleges and universities have announced steep tuition increases for next year much steeper than the current, very low, rate of inflation. They say the increases are needed because of a loss in value of university endowments heavily investing in common 1 stock. I am skeptical. A business firm chooses the price that maximizes its net revenues, irrespective fluctuations in income; and increasingly the 2 outlook of universities in the United States is indistinguishable from those of 3 business firms. The rise in tuitions may reflect the fact economic uncertainty 4 increases the demand for education. The biggest cost of being in the school is foregoing income from a job (this is primarily a factor in 5 graduate and professional-school tuition); the poor ones job prospects, 6 the more sense it makes to reallocate time from the job market to education, in order to make oneself more marketable. The ways which universities make themselves attractive to students 7 include soft majors, student evaluations of teachers, giving students a governance role, and eliminate required courses. 8 Sky-high tuitions have caused universities to regard their students as customers. Just as business firms sometimes collude to shorten the 9 rigors of competition, universities collude to minimize the cost to them of the athletes whom they recruit in order to stimulate alumni donations, so the best athletes now often bypass higher education in order to obtain salaries earlier from professional teams. And until they were stopped by the antitrust authorities, the Ivy League schools colluded to limit competition for the best students, by agreeing not to award scholarships on the basis of merit rather than purely of need-just like business firms agreeing not to give discounts on their best 10 customer. 20062006 We use language primarily as a means of communication with other human beings. Each of us shares with the community in which we live a store of words and meanings as well as agreeing conventions as 1 to the way in which words should be arranged to convey a particular 2 message: the English speaker has in his disposal vocabulary and a 3 set of grammatical rules which enables him to communicate his 4 thoughts and feelings, in a variety of styles, to the other English 5 2 speakers. His vocabulary, in particular, both that which he uses actively and that which he recognizes, increases in size as he grows old as a result of education and experience. 6 But, whether the language store is relatively small or large, the system remains no more, than a psychological reality for tike inpidual, unless he has a means of expressing it in terms able to be seen by another 7 member of his linguistic community; he bas to give tile system a concrete transmission form. We take it for granted rice two most 8 common forms of transmission-by means of sounds produced by our vocal organs (speech) or by visual signs (writing). And these are 9 among most striking of human achievements. 10 2007 From what has been said, it must be clear that no one can make very positive statements about how language originated. There is no material in any language today and in the earliest 1 _ _ records of ancient languages show us language in a new and 2 _ emerging state. It is often said, of course, that the language 3 _ _ originated in cries of anger, fear, pain and pleasure, and the 4 _ necessary evidence is entirely lacking: there are no remote tribes, no ancient records, providing evidence of a language with a large proportion of such cries 5 _ than we find in English. It is true that the absence of such evidence does not disprove the theory, but in 6_ other grounds too the theory is not very attractive. People of all races and languages make rather similar noises in return to pain or pleasure. The fact that 7 such noises are similar on the lips of Frenchmen and Malaysians whose languages are utterly different, serves to emphasize on the fundamental difference 8 between these noises and language proper. We may say that the cries of pain or chortles of amusement are largely reflex actions, instinctive to large extent, 9 whereas language proper does not consist of signs but of these that have to be learnt and that are 10 wholly conventional.