College administrators are becoming consumed with gaining institutional prestige and financial rewards, and schools are using honorary degrees as a cheap public relations tool.

And the entry of Christie's, in collaboration with Cushman & Wakefield, one of the nation's largest commercial real estate brokers, may add institutional prestige to auctions on this side of the Atlantic.

It won't refocus the final years of high school on learning rather than test-taking, and it won't shift attention from an obsessive focus on institutional prestige to the substance of college curriculums.

The officer corps fears "the loss of institutional prestige" that comes from involvement in government corruption, he said, and "the political use that Chávez is now making of the armed forces."

In so doing, the museum throws its institutional prestige behind an artist whose place in 20th-century art is sharply disputed.

The formal naming of these elements has little importance for science, chemists agree, but names have a great bearing on personal and institutional prestige and on the politics of the international nuclear community.

Classic factors like institutional prestige, faculty publishing, alumni donations and magazine rankings don't apply.

The professors, too, are distracted and pressured, whether by the need to maintain institutional prestige or by the sheer frenzy of activity interrupting their creative cycles.

Colleges that once viewed scholarships as a way of opening their doors to needy students now view them primarily as tools for enhancing their own institutional prestige.

Sure, people have hung all sorts of other cruft like institutional prestige on top of that function but the only really important role is to tell the rest of the community what to spend their time reading.