Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class

For those of us fighting the good fight in the academy, this is the single most useful analysis of the conditions in which we find ourselves that I have read!

Imagine the world without Einstein's intellectual pursuits. Imagine, too, an advanced post-industrial society without a rigorously educated middle-class. Imagine the end of the United States as a global power. Now connect the cornucopia of these images. Markets are not the gods of serious intellectual pursuits, a point that Christopher Newfield implies so well in his sophisticated analysis of how public higher education has been victimized by a culture wars' discourse promulgated by political coalitions steeped in the stagnation of conservative paternalism. In brief, the U.S. public has been cheated out of the best possibilities of public higher education as public universities have deteriorated financially over the last four decades. No amount of economic jingoism or political manipulation can nullify the preponderance of empirical evidence Newfield amasses in support of his contentions. Worse yet, policymakers have abandoned a robust vision of postsecondary education as a collective good. Increasingly, the parasitic norms of privatization and commercialization drive intellectual decisions. Arguably, until this saturated generation of mass media and commodity consumption, the very best public achievements of Western civilization have been based on the genius of free inquiry (even more so than free enterprise). University faculty members have, for the most part, devoted themselves to research rigorous enough to expose ludicrous ideologies, materialistic fantasies, pedantic indulgences, and bogus evidence. For the great qualitative aspects of collective human existence, market ideology has too often been short-sighted and insufficient. To witness, the persistent intergenerational scourges of disease, idiocy, racism, sexism, and poverty could not have been challenged effectively without even relatively modest advances in expertise or knowledge. One great reason the powerful ship Titanic sank was a failure of leadership and critical thinking. Leaders ignored the signs of the times and plunged many innocent lives into ruin and devastation. As in the Titanic story, naïve political leaders and popular social conformity to trivial mythologies can gradually plunge great nations into the abyss of ignorant demise. As noted philosopher, Randall R. Curren establishes in his poignant book entitled Aristotle on the Necessity of Public Education, authentic democracy depends on critical thinking in order to escape the tyranny of the majority as well as the barbarism of ignorance. Slothful, mediocre, and superficial thinking ruins civilization. Newfield shows how such shoddy thinking has imperiled the treasures of public higher education, before suggesting how this situation can be refuted and transformed for the collective good of future generations. Public higher education matters.

What a delight, after several years of dull, self-important books on the state of academia, to receive another clearly thought through book from Chris Newfield. As usual his research is not only well documented, but widely drawn. His curiosity lends each example the quality of a good story--we want to follow and learn more and see where it all comes out. His sense of Americana, all of the beliefs, myths, and dreams enlivening the hopes of the middle-class, provide a compelling context for the arguments of the book. We begin to care what happens in all these committee rooms and budget conferences and administrative policy-taking. He takes us along to see through the myriad details into the resolute engine driving the decision-making. And he does this as a traveling companion, not as a didact. Newfield also lays a foundation for a re-making of the university, after the relentless unmaking, not in the usual fix-it mode, but in providing a comprehensive understanding of the problems and how they arise. Rather than finger shaking he directs a focused intelligence on the myriad causes, missteps, and politizations, which turned the university from its committed path into unexpected territory. Probably the main reason to read this book is that it is actually a great read. A non-academic friend picked Unmaking the Public University off my desk, read a few pages and asked to borrow it. When asked why, she said she found the style compelling. The other important reason is that we begin to understand what has happened to public education and thus what can facilitate reincarnation. Deirdre C. Patrick Palo Alto