For at least 30 years, professional work has been changing. Even such once-elite professionals as doctors, lawyers, and professors have become subject to significant control. Single-practitioner medical practices have given way to group practices subject to the rules of insurance plans; lawyers join mammoth firms where paralegals time the steps from their desks to the copy machine to bill by the minute; professors routinely submit several sorts of yearly reports detailing their scholarship, teaching, service, and community outreach; and, in a new development, some universities, such as nine units in the University of Texas system, have released productivity measures for individual professors to reveal whether they are have added value to the university and so are worth their salt. In this article, the author stresses how productivity data, now part of the academic plan of most research universities, are part and parcel of what top administrators in the higher-education industry define as "business as usual." When universities' top administrators release these metrics, they are telling taxpayers that their monies are being well spent. They are countering the argument that higher education is a private good--an item that primarily benefits those with degrees rather than the public. Over the past two decades, states have been decreasing higher education's public subsidy and so, by their actions, have been declaring that students and their families should pay for college rather than receive a significant public subsidy. (Contains 1 table and 8 endnotes.)