Attend a lecture in the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar "At Risk U: The Past, Present, & Future of Academic Freedom" lecture series with Chris Newfield (Independent Social Research Foundation, London).
What Criticism Teaches: The University Conditions of Non-Economic Life Prior to the 2024 presidential election, public disappointment with universities had reached epidemic proportions. The fees are too damn high, debt and work-study damage students’ learning and their college experience, and universities seem to do a poor job of launching students on their careers.
Then, the Trump Administration took power, and has proceeded to undermine every university revenue source, from federal research funding and student loan programs to international student tuition and endowment income.
University presidents and boards have not come together to reject these moves as illegal and unjustified. Nor have they withstood or redirected the reputational damage inflicted by unleashed allegations of antisemitism and bias.
Where do we go from here? I’ll argue that public universities must confront and replace an entrenched financial model that disserves education while undermining their own fiscal solvency. We’ll discuss the incorrect belief that learning equals earning in conjunction with epic institutional dependence on debt, asset price inflation, and risk management.
We’ll find a pathway out of the current impasse that derives from findings in humanities scholarship about how everyday life benefits from the suspension of economic incentives.About the SpeakerChristopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London.
He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), is co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and is co-author of What Metrics Matter?
Academic Life in the Quantified University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). His current projects involve the cultures of “AI,” literary and cultural knowledge, the future of higher education, and the culture of social equality.