As a teacher of educational leadership, the author of this article has observed that an alarming number of his doctoral students tend to view colleges and universities as little more than failed businesses. Students have witnessed a rising tide of corporate executives appointed to top academic posts, suggesting that boards of trustees see higher education's principal challenges as commercial rather than academic. The matter-of-factness with which many people in academe now make the case for the university as a business--as if it were completely natural to discuss academic institutions in terms formerly reserved for multinational corporations-points to a distressing subtext: that nothing much is worth protecting against the steady expansion of business methods, and we should simply yield to them because they are superior in some objective, rational sense. Toward the end of a class focusing on organizational change and adaptation in higher education, the author told his students to assume that they had been charged with redesigning a college or university to better address contemporary challenges. They had carte blanche to abolish or add any organizational structures, features, or routines that would help the cause. He asked them to paint a picture of their "new and improved" institution, anticipate sources of resistance to their vision, and identify techniques they might employ for winning people over to their vision. Much to his dismay, students viewed universities as flawed, deficient, increasingly irrelevant, and in desperate need of corporate management models to set everything right. He argues that universities gradually converging toward one model, guided by commercial norms and practices is good for neither education nor the public interest, and that educators need to avoid wholesale declarations that universities should be run as businesses. He makes a case for strong academic leadership, and warns that shifting to uniform corporate models for running institutions of higher education, could endanger the uniqueness, and enrichment opportunities the academic experience presents.