This essay reports on a roundtable of higher education leaders, association heads, government officials, and public policy experts that examined the changes in policymakers' attitudes toward federally sponsored research. Since World War II national science policy has made universities the principal locus of basic research in the United States. But an increasing sense of disjunction between the values of the academy and the dispositions of the federal government reflects changes in a society increasingly skeptical of the claims to special treatment often made by colleges and universities. The intensified pace of the political process has led the federal government to allow markets to replace policy commitments intended to sustain traditional institutions' academic values and processes. It matters less to Washington whether a student spends a Pell Grant attending a for-profit trade school or a traditional institution. This essay argues that for colleges and universities to succeed, they must become mission centered, market smart, and politically savvy: mission centered to find and adhere to central academic values and missions; market smart to promote coherence and cohesion; and politically savvy to understand the changed nature of the political process in which only a limited number of goals can be achieved. (RH)