Christopher Newfield

A powerful, hopeful critique of the unnecessary death spiral of higher education, The Great Mistake is essential reading for those who wonder why students have been paying more to get less and for everyone who cares about the role the higher education system plays in improving the lives of average Americans.

How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them

The Great Mistake

An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities, deceiving the public to serve their own ends. It is a deep and revealing analysis that is long overdue. Newfield carefully describes how this campaign operated, using extensive research into public university archives. He launches the story with the expansive vision of an equitable and creative America that emerged from the post-war boom in college access, and traces the gradual emergence of the anti-egalitarian “corporate university,” practices that ranged from racial policies to research budgeting. Newfield shows that the culture wars have actually been an economic war that a conservative coalition in business, government, and academia have waged on that economically necessary but often independent group, the college-educated middle class. Newfield’s research exposes the crucial fact that the culture wars have functioned as a kind of neutron bomb, one that pulverizes the social and culture claims of college grads while leaving their technical expertise untouched. Unmaking the Public University incisively sets the record straight, describing a forty-year economic war waged on the college-educated public, and awakening us to a vision of social development shared by scientists and humanists alike.

The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class

Unmaking the Public University

Mukul Kumar

Zachary Bleemer

Aashish Mehta

Chris Muellerleile

Counting What's Really Important to College Students

Metrics That Matter

Avery Gordon

This is a book is a groundbreaking interdisciplinary collection that will generate a great deal of penetrating discussion on a broad range of fronts.

Mapping Multiculturalism

Stephen John

Anna Alexandrova

This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health. Numbers may seem fragile--they are, after all, frequent objects of obfuscation or outright denial--but they have also never been more influential in our society, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantification and shows how it can be a force for good despite its many abuses. Limits of the Numerical focuses on quantification in several contexts: the role of numerical estimates and targets in explaining and planning for climate change; the quantification of outcomes in teaching and research; and numbers representing health, the effectiveness of medical interventions, and well-being more broadly. The authors complicate our understanding of these numbers, uncovering, for example, epistemic problems with some core numbers in climate science. But their theme is less the problems revealed by case studies than the methodological issues common to them all. This volume shows the many ways that qualitative and quantitative approaches can productively interact--how the limits of the numerical can be overcome through equitable partnerships with historical, institutional, and philosophical analysis.

The Abuses and Uses of Quantification

Limits of the Numerical

This book resituates the political correctness debates in the humanities branch of the academy. It contends that conservatives have tainted entire academic disciplines to cause university humanists to go from irrelevant to dangerous overnight.

The Humanities And Society In The 1990s

After Political Correctness

Emphasizing how profoundly the American research university has been shaped by business and the humanities alike, Ivy and Industry is a vital contribution to debates about the corporatization of higher education in the United States. Christopher Newfield traces major trends in the intellectual and institutional history of the research university from 1880 to 1980. He pays particular attention to the connections between the changing forms and demands of American business and the cultivation of a university-trained middle class. He contends that by imbuing its staff and students with seemingly opposed ideas—of self-development on the one hand and of an economic system existing prior to and inviolate of their own activity on the other—the university has created a deeply conflicted middle class. Newfield views management as neither inherently good nor bad, but rather as a challenge to and tool for negotiating modern life. In Ivy and Industry he integrates business and managerial philosophies from Taylorism through Tom Peters’s “culture of excellence” with the speeches and writings of leading university administrators and federal and state education and science policies. He discusses the financial dependence on industry and government that was established in the university’s early years and the equal influence of liberal arts traditions on faculty and administrators. He describes the arrival of a managerial ethos on campus well before World War II, showing how managerial strategies shaped even fields seemingly isolated from commerce, like literary studies. Demonstrating that business and the humanities have each had a far stronger impact on higher education in the United States than is commonly thought, Ivy and Industry is the dramatic story of how universities have approached their dual mission of expanding the mind of the individual while stimulating economic growth.

Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980

Ivy and Industry

Professor Christopher Newfield

What is the political sensibility of America's middle class? Where did it come from? What kind of life does it hope for? Newfield finds a major source in the writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and offers a radically revisionist account of his powerful influence on individualism and democracy in the United States. Emerson's thought encompassed the most important cultural and social changes of his time - a new urban street culture, early versions of the business corporation, experimental communes, the rise of women authors, new forms of labor, a less father-centered family, frontier wars with American Indians, Mexicans, and others, and the controversy over slavery. Locating him at the center not only of philosophical but of national developments, Newfield shows how Emerson taught the middle class to respond to these changes through a form of personal identity best termed "submissive individualism". Newfield identifies a previously unacknowledged connection between liberal and authoritarian impulses in Emerson's work and explores its significance in various domains: domestic life, the changing New England economy, theories of poetic language, homoerotic friendship, and racial hierarchy. This provocative reassessment of Emerson's writing suggests that American middle class culture encourages deference rather than independence. But it also suggests that a better understanding of Emerson will help us develop the stronger, alternative forms of personhood he often desired himself. This book is a major contribution to our understanding of the development and the current limits of liberalism in America.

Christopher Newfield

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