We take large, modern research universities so much for granted that it requires an effort to realise how easily we could do without them - even Berkeley, Harvard, and Oxford, to take the three that members of the academy themselves recently rated as the best in the world. Consider the higher education of the young. One of university’s main functions in the field of tertiary education - pre-professional education - could be performed in schools of law, accountancy, medicine, teacher-training and the like where professional education itself is given. As for liberal education - introducing students to a wide range of disciplines to develop their minds while they are young - it is best provided in small colleges by people who take it seriously. It is not assisted, but threatened, by diversions of time, money, and managerial effort into the research activities of the modern university.

”Blue skies” research could easily be done in publicly funded research institutes by professional researchers unencumbered by the pretence that they are engaged in teaching the young. And the function that increasingly dominates the life of the modern university - doing research and development for the benefit, and often under the control, of multinational pharmaceutical and telecommunications companies - could and perhaps should be done in commercial research parks. The new California Institutes for Science and Innovation described in Jennifer Washburn’s University Inc. are to all intents and purposes just that, even though they are one-third funded by the State of California and two-thirds by private corporations, physically housed on the campuses of the University of California system, and staffed in part by academics.

What would be lost, if we disaggregated Berkeley, Harvard and Oxford? One slightly surprising fact is that there would be no problem recruiting the next generation of high-grade research workers; in the US, the best liberal arts colleges, such as Williams, Amherst or Swarthmore, where the focus is on undergraduate education, send a higher proportion of their graduates into research training than do Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale. It is less surprising on second thoughts. The idea that a student gets a deeper insight into Shakespeare by attending a university whose hospital is especially good at transplants is not very plausible; but one has to believe it to suppose that, say, Stanford’s excellence in advanced surgical procedures automatically enhances the education in the humanities that it provides.

Since we can imagine a world without research universities, where the disparate things they do are spread among professional schools, community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research institutes and research parks, we might wonder whether there is any function that only a research university can perform - and whether it is one that is threatened by co-operation with industry. Those are the questions asked and answered in University Inc.

The book is somewhat sensationally sub-titled, “the corporate corruption of higher education”. But it is actually a calm, balanced and careful look at a topic that has exercised many commentators, among them Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. Bok’s exploration of the damage that corporate ties can do was published last year. Universities in the Marketplace was no more reassuring than Washburn’s book, but she has more to say than he did about the wider legal and political context in which universities work.

John Dewey provided the received view of the university’s unique place in society 90 years ago. A century ago, it was common for trustees to demand the dismissal of professors whose political views they disliked - and to get their own way. Security of tenure was needed, said Dewey, because the university’s unique role was to perform “the truth function” - to discover and disseminate the truth so far as it could be known, for its own sake and for no ulterior purpose. That is why “blue skies” research belongs inside a university rather than in a government-funded institute: only inside the university is there the necessary pressure to publish the truth, unvarnished, unadjusted, awkward and embarrassing as that truth may be.

At least, that’s the theory. Performing the “truth function” is not easy. Nor is it threatened by only one danger. Ross Gregory Douthat’s acerbic Privilege gives so many reasons for disliking Harvard that anyone who reads him alongside Jennifer Washburn may conclude that the damage done to universities by commercialisation is icing on the cake of their self-inflicted intellectual and social corruption. Still, we must not exaggerate; at the end of Privilege, readers will find Douthat succumbing, as everyone does, to the hope that higher education’s better self can triumph over all. Nobody ever hoped to see Enron’s better self.

University Inc. is built around three ideas that should animate thinking about university relations with commerce and industry. The first is that there is no gainsaying that where research can benefit everyone, it should - whether by making industry more efficient, finding more effective drugs, miniaturising electronic circuits or whatever. The idea that pure research is too pure to be sullied by exploitation is plain foolish.

The second is that whatever legal framework ensures that research can be exploited should not create conflicts of interest dangerous to the functioning of higher education. Many of these conflicts are familiar: too many professors draw a salary for teaching students while they have what amounts to a full-time job running a spinoff company or consulting on the side. Universities have rules limiting the amount of such work their faculty can do; but where someone brings in large sums of money to the university, rigorous enforcement of the rules too often goes by the board.

The third thought is that since the public spends a great deal of money on the research done in universities, the public ought to get a fair share of the benefit. Otherwise, the public pays for the research twice over, first through its taxes and then through the profits made by the companies that exploit the research. The question is what a fair return to the public actually is.

Might the public get a better bargain if the results of research remain available to anyone who wishes to use them, as part of the intellectual “commons”? And might the public have grounds for thinking that, if private sponsors fund research, the quality of what is produced should be more carefully policed than at present? When more than 90 per cent of papers reporting sponsored research into the effectiveness of drugs report positive findings, and only 60 per cent of non-sponsored research do so, anxiety about the corruption of the researcher’s judgment - even inadvertent - is not misplaced.

The temptation is to denounce the wickedness of corporate capitalism, university administrators and the other “usual suspects”. Washburn is too intelligent to succumb to that temptation. Universities have been starved of public funding over the past two decades and can hardly be expected to pass up the offer of private funds; and the pace of innovation in fields such as bio-technology is such that no company can pass up the chance to be involved in research. What is needed is not a retreat into an ivory tower but better regulation.

Universities Inc. induces two reactions in a British reader. The first is to envy the US its investigative reporters. The other is to wonder what a British version of Washburn might uncover. British universities have lately been encouraged to engage in aggressive patenting and licensing and it is hard to believe that they do not run the dangers she describes. If they do not, it is perhaps less because British universities are full of high-minded, strong-willed academics immune to the attractions of the dollar than because neither government nor business has been signing cheques as large as their American counterparts.

Ross Douthat’s entertaining account of undergraduate alienation, on the other hand, induces the usual envy of the young for their fluency and vigour, and a little gratitude not to have been among the Harvard faculty and Douthat’s undergraduate contemporaries who get their comeuppance in these pages. He does, however, make a serious argument worth chewing on. The whole point of Harvard, he thinks - and Harvard here stands for the Ivy League, its competitors such as Stanford or Duke, and its liberal arts cousins such as Amherst and Williams - is to reproduce the American ruling class. One might guess that he would have thought the argument over “social engineering” provoked by Steven Schwartz’s report into university admissions in England and Wales last year was pretty naive. What else do elite universities engage in if not social engineering?

How indignant Douthat is about this fact is unclear. What he is certainly angry about is the basis on which the elite is selected. Forced to choose between an arbitrarily recruited elite whose rank is a matter of birth and accident - and whose arbitrariness might induce in the fortunate a certain sense of noblesse oblige - and the meritocracy that Harvard has put together on the basis of PSATs, SAT Is, SAT IIs, APs and the assorted extra-curriculars that American high school students engage in, he prefers the former.

This is not entirely irrational. Gordon Brown and Sir Peter Lampl are tremendous fans of the Harvard Admissions Office, but Douthat has done his homework. One hundred out of the 31,700 high schools in America provide more than a fifth of the students at Harvard, Yale and Princeton. These high schools are overwhelmingly private and heavily concentrated in the so-called “blue” states - those that vote Democrat. So Harvard is politically and geographically unrepresentative in the extreme. The university’s attempt to create a “diverse” student body, meanwhile, amounts to recruiting a small number of black and Asian students who often take the first opportunity to self-segregate and frustrate the university’s hope that their presence will do their white contemporaries some rather ill-defined educational good.

Although Harvard gives generous scholarship aid, the campus is no more economically diverse than it is politically diverse. The less well-off half of the American population provides less than 10 per cent of Ivy League students; 75 percent of students come from the top quarter of American families. The elite polished by Harvard is a narrowly recruited group; it may be cosmetically diverse - with enough black, Asian and ethnic minority students to match the American population in skin colour - but economically, ideologically, socially and culturally, it is nothing of the sort.

Having pointed out those truths, Ross Douthat writes a memoir of student life along the usual lines: sexual frustration, social humiliation and a little guilt at having taken too little advantage of the intellectual opportunities on offer. Douthat left Harvard in the summer of 2002, but throws in a coda on the bust-up between the university’s president, Larry Summers, and the glamorous black philosopher, Cornel West, that erupted soon after Summers’ arrival the previous fall. Douthat likes Summers, who “was loud and active and curious, bustling about campus with questions and demands and displaying what we came to realise - to the dismay of the professoriate and the delight of everyone else - was a strong desire to shake things up”. He doesn’t care for West.

Summers found West and the “Afro-Am” programme irresistible targets. Even West’s best friends worried that his passion for celebrity was getting dangerously out of hand. No matter what doubts they had about Summers, they shared Summers’ view that Harvard did not appoint university professors so that they could make bad rap albums. West left for Princeton, and many people thought Summers had been a bully; Douthat and his conservative friends thought it was good riddance.

But Douthat touches on the crucial issue: Summers had come from government, where subordinates jumped at his orders. Academics are notoriously unwilling to jump at the orders of presidents in the US or vice-chancellors in the UK. Running a university by “bull in a china shop” methods tends to end in broken china and no meeting of minds. It did so for Summers earlier this spring. His off-the-cuff suggestion that there might be fewer women than men in high-end science research for all the obvious reasons - notably because they bear most of the burdens of family life - but also because they had less innate ability, provoked a row that ended with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passing a vote of no confidence in their president.

Richard Bradley’s Harvard Rules provides an extended, blow-by-blow account of what Larry Summers has been up to since his installation in September 2001. Unlike Douthat, Bradley does not like Summers, though many of his reasons for this will cut no ice with British readers. Bradley complains that Summers is uninterested in college athletics and insufficiently appreciative of the successes of Harvard’s hockey team.

Another complaint is that Summers wants Harvard to be more like MIT. This is a deeply meant insult, since the Harvard view of MIT is that it is a hangout for nerds and social inadequates. Those of us who think that universities ought, among other things, to be places where the young have their minds stretched and their snobberies chastened, would probably side with Summers. No university is a finishing school, and Harvard less than most.

But the interest of Harvard Rules - at least for nerds who are fascinated by the managerial problems of serious universities - is its account of who really wields what sort of power over Harvard. Fundamentally, it is the Corporation, the seven “Fellows”, who have life tenure, who have absolute and unaccountable budgetary authority, who meet at unstated times and provide no published record of their deliberations. Not until 1985 was the first Jew appointed; not until 1989 the first woman; and not until 2000 the first non-white. As Bradley says, “If a public company had a similar governing board, the shareholders would revolt.”

That suggests that all the president of Harvard needs in order to exercise dictatorial authority is to have the Corporation on his side. It isn’t so, or, rather, it wasn’t so when Summers was appointed. The Harvard doctrine of “every tub on its own bottom” meant that much of Harvard’s $23bn endowment was in the hands of the deans of the Law School, Business School, Harvard College and so on. To dictate a strategy for the whole university under those conditions, the president has to establish his authority over his deans, by fair means or foul. Harvard Rules is largely the story of Larry Summers’ campaign to centralise control in his own hands. How successful he has been is a story whose final chapter is yet to be written.

Absurdly enough, it was Summers’ efforts to be conciliatory that emboldened his critics to go after him over his remarks about women in science. If he had stuck to his guns and said he was speculating idly, and that even the president of Harvard should be allowed to do so occasionally, he might have had an easier time. Instead of which he did everything but offer to go on a course of advanced sensitivity training - much as he had first said he thought affirmative action didn’t work, and then said he thought it did, in the middle of the row over Cornel West. The smell of blood was irresistible.

But what did the Harvard faculty really object to? The pro-Summers school reckoned it was an outbreak of political correctness and an attempt to declare any discussion of the innate abilities of women as far off-limits as any discussion of the failures of affirmative action. The anti-Summers school thought it was pay-back time for the roughness of his management methods. The no-confidence vote may well cost Summers his job, though if it does, it will do so only after a decorous interval.

The Harvard Corporation is not obliged to take any notice of faculty opinion; but Harvard wants to raise several billion dollars to move large parts of the university across the Charles River to Allston, and if Larry Summers’ ability to tap donors for the money has been damaged by the prolonged row, the Corporation will not flinch from bidding him goodbye. But if the major donors share Ross Douthat’s hard-nosed and conservative view of the world, they will cough up with enthusiasm and Larry Summers will be safe for the foreseeable future.

Harvard Rules induces mixed feelings. Harvard really is a great university; but it provides a poorer undergraduate education than Yale and Princeton, and it can be a pretty abrasive place in which to work. Offered a choice between Berkeley and Harvard, many people would head for Berkeley, and given a choice between Harvard and Oxford, many would stay in unabrasive Oxford. As to Privilege: if you have taught in an Ivy League school, and even more if you are the parent of an Ivy League student, the jokes soon pall. But, the book should cheer up British vice-chancellors; they are as a class vastly over-impressed by Harvard and could do with some reassurance that Cambridge provides a better education than Cambridge, Mass., and does it at half the cost and to a wider segment of the population.

Alan Ryan is Warden of New College, Oxford. He was professor of politics at Princeton University from 1988-96.

UNIVERSITY, INC: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education
by Jennifer Washburn
Basic Books $26, 352 pages

PRIVILEGE: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class
by Ross Gregory Douthat
Hyperion $24.95, 304 pages

HARVARD RULES: The Struggle for the Soul of the World’s Most Powerful University
by Richard Bradley
HarperCollins $25.95, 400 pages