So take the universities, which in many respects are not very different from the media in the way they function though they're a much more complex system, so they're harder to study systematically. Universities do not generate nearly enough funds to support themselves from tuition money alone: they're parasitic institutions that need to be supported from the outside, and that means they're dependent on wealthy alumni, on corporations, and on the government, which are groups with the same basic interests. Well, as long as the universities serve those interests, they'll be funded. If they ever stop serving those interests, they'll start to get in trouble.
So for example, in the late 1960s it began to appear that the universities were not adequately performing that service students were asking questions, they were thinking independently, they were rejecting a lot of the Establishment value system, challenging all sorts of things and the corporations began to react to that, they began to react in a number of ways. For one thing, they began to develop alternative programs, like IBM began to set up kind of a vocational training program to produce engineers on their own: if MIT wasn't going to do it for them the way they wanted, they'd do it themselves and that would have meant they'd stop funding MIT. Well, of course things never really got out of hand in the Sixties, so the moves in that direction were very limited. But those are the kinds of pressures there are.

-- Noam Chomsky