Today, academic leaders will be tempted to double down on the private good definition of universities under a president who reveres private wealth and transactional business relationships.  This talk argues that this will further reduce the university’s stature in the eyes of both the Trump administration and the public.  In contrast, restoring the university’s broad public impact will fix its public reputation and reenergize its students and personnel.  This lecture extends the argument of Newfield’s The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). 

Christopher Newfield is Professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.  Much of his research is in Critical University Studies, which links his enduring concern with humanities teaching to the study of how higher education continues to be re-shaped by industry and other economic forces.  His most recent books on this subject are The Great Mistake (2016), Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008), and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (2003).  He blogs on higher education policy at Remaking the University, and writes for the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Sponsored by the Campus Faculty Association, Department of English, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Department of Educational Policy, Organization & Leadership, Center for Advanced Study, Gender & Women's Studies, and the Higher Education Collaborative. 

Thanks to the Center for Advanced Study listserv for this information item.