Higher education is not only about money. At whatever appropriate cost as borne by whomever, it is supposed to provide life-long value to the students and to society. Yet some critics now complain that in the current system, with its rising costs, students are not in general learning much if anything, and there is a good deal of data to suggest that many college students work rather little and are guided in the main by social rather than academic concerns. Whose fault is that? Once again, the faculty is often assigned the blame. If only the faculty cared more about their students and less about their research, all would be well, say the critics. Higher education exists in a very competitive market for the talent of both faculty and students. Yet a familiar complaint about colleges and universities is that they do not know their customers and respond to their wishes. Colleges and universities have changed steadily in response to the wishes and inclinations of students and their parents, often in ways that are then lamented by the critics who claim that higher education costs too much and that students are not learning anything. The institutions that have built elaborate recreational facilities and food courts and other amenities so often complained about by the critics have built them not because the faculty or even most administrators thought them essential to an education of high quality. They have built these things because the market has demanded them and has been willing to pay for them to some degree. The faculty, meanwhile, faced with a good many students (and some of their parents) who complain about their grades and who relentlessly choose courses with little assigned reading and no assigned writing, may very well come to feel that the rewards for doing research and debating it with their colleagues are somewhat greater than for teaching undergraduates. The author contends that the allocation of resources must be based first and foremost on an institution's own values and not on the values of an imagined marketplace or of magazine and newspaper editors in faraway cities and countries or even, in many respects, on the preferences of eighteen-year-olds and their parents. In this respect, so-called responsibility centered management--in which each academic or nonacademic unit of the institution is thought of as a profit (or loss) center, and resources are allocated to the most "profitable" based on student demand or the ability to generate resources from outside the institution--leaves values, properly so called, and educational principle entirely on the margins. It will not always be easy to resist certain political and economic pressures or the pressures of popular culture that one ought to resist. But when it is not possible to resist them, it should not be because nobody knows that they ought to be resisted in light of one's values. This will require individual and institutional courage of a kind that the nation desperately needs. People's national life is at stake.