What Thames may be up to (given the hints in the article in "The Independent") and given the precedents of other universities around the country--big and small, prestigious and otherwise--is to put USM in direct competition with for-profit schools. 

For-profit schools get money in two ways: from corporations, by delivering training programs for them, and from students who believe they will have jobs at corporations later.  (This is basically the pitch.)   In other words, Thames seems to want to undo the old-time status of the university—when it stood relatively free of market forces-- and thrust it headlong into the marketplace. 

Obviously, he is stressing the upside of this, and not the downside.  The problem is that a university, private or public, doesn't have the flexibility a for-profit educational business does (like Phoenix University) to ride out the up and the downs of the marketplace. And this is true even if it rids itself of the things holding it back as far as "flexibility" goes. This blame list includes faculty governance, accreditation, accounting that isn't "unit" based, overhead items like libraries that function as libraries . . .  Another big thing a profit driven corporatist such as Thames needs to divest, right off,  of course, is liberal arts; they’re not cost effective. 

However, in our case--if my analysis is near enough the mark--the public relations debate

is not going to be won by allowing the argument to be conducted in these terms: the

practical, hard-nosed financial, business types against the impractical, dreamy, elitist

liberal art types. Rather, a sound strategy in the debate would be to focus on the fact that
the business types are themselves really, really loony--really dreamy, really off the wall, and haven't done their financial homework.  Further, they simply don't have the deep pockets necessary to make competition with for-profit educational businesses succeed--unless, of course, they have some money coming in from a covert source. Harvard, for instance, blew tens of millions when it attempted, without success, to found an in-house for-profit College. In other words, in the debate over the corporatizing of the university, the advocates of liberal arts need to, must, represent themselves as the practical guys, the fiscal conservatives, the good stewards of our society’s resources. 

A Harvard Press book I recently read, “Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education,” by Daivd L. Kirp, makes many of these points and, further, shows pretty conclusively that not only do universities fail miserably at competing in the marketplace but, in fact, they are, in the long run, better providers of instruction and education than their for-profit counterparts. This is especially true in the kind of uncertain economy we have now when, for employees, what counts most is flexibility and "troubleshooting," not rote application of learning (which is what for-profits do best).