Author's Response

Abstract

I am both grateful and humbled by the time that Trevor Griffey, Edward Balleisen, Claire Potter, and Christopher Newfield took to craft their incisive critiques, generous comments, and concerns about American higher education's past, present, and future. I also need to thank Eric Arnesen for asking me to write something provocative about the idea of the neoliberal university in the pandemic's early weeks. He asked for something beyond the more familiar look at the last forty or even sixty years. Months later he managed to pull together a formidable cast of respondents. One reason that Arnesen approached me was Griffey's response to the 2020 LAWCHA Presidential Address that Griffey, an outspoken organizer, mentioned. Balleisen is a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, where he serves as vice provost for interdisciplinary studies overseeing an array of projects, including Versatile Humanists at Duke. Claire Potter was one of the country's most multifaceted historians before joining the New School for Social Research. I still pass along posts from Potter's Tenured Radical blog to graduate students looking for the kind of honesty, humor, and insight into the American educational enterprise that helped me so much when I was struggling to finish my PhD at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I didn't know Newfield when he was a UCSB literature professor at the forefront of showing that universities needed to be remade. We met when I was a Cambridge University postdoc. He was in residence for the 2011 Future University symposium when I happened to be finishing up the book projects connected to my dissertation on the Sunbelt and had just started to think about exploring the business of education vital to capital flight.Even though I didn't hesitate to accept Arnesen's invitation, I reluctantly opened the responses as they appeared in my inbox. A lot had happened after he had first approached me just weeks after I had sent a book manuscript off to my publisher and been locked down in the Bay Area, where I was on leave. I had returned to writing a book on the public-private, creatively financed origins of state university systems competing for students, donors, grants, and earmarks. I was close to finishing a draft of a manuscript that I had set aside when elder-care responsibilities made the research on student loan policy seem more manageable than diving into university archives across the country. Arnesen's invitation seemed a way to show how the student loan and campus financial crises were deeply intertwined although the complex stories of those disasters have often been told separately. I did not anticipate the speed with which Indentured Students would go through peer review and into production. So my publisher asked that it be cited in anything coming out so close to its release. Pruning my original effusive footnotes also got me closer to Labor's word limit. I understand why the citations frustrated Griffey, as did skipping over Mettler's idea of a policyscape that I covered in detail in a published literature review. I had been thinking about what an essay completed in September had not done as these commentaries filtered in during the Biden administration's first 100 days, when progressive Democrats were openly pushing the president to do more for borrowers and campuses.Going over my essay and reading these responses left me marveling about the overarching agreement that something must change and the wide-ranging debate about what has been and must be done, much less where, how, why, by whom, and for whom. Yet those differences are hardly new. Newfield generously placed me alongside other revisionists who have rejected the idea that the academy was and is an ivory tower unto itself, an impressive body of work that, since I first drafted this essay, has grown to include Christine Groeger's The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (2021) and Davarian Baldwin's In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (2021). Both examine postsecondary schools but also include their local impact and complicity in the inequality that higher education was and is still presumed to have been able to mitigate. They do so by starting their stories before the 1970s that Griffey considers of particular importance and even the postwar period that Balleisen's response emphasizes. Yet Groeger, Baldwin, and other experts were not the first to question celebratory accounts and appraisals of US higher education's history; their predecessors include Merle Curti, Roderick Nash, Daniel Noble, Laurence Veysey, and David Levine.1Yet those scholars and their better-known and celebrated contemporaries, like Roger Geiger, differed on what aspects of US postsecondary higher education that they would parse. Their choices, like the four respondents’ decisions about what to focus on, reflect the complexity of this country's postsecondary “ecosystem,” as I recently heard Groeger fittingly call it.2 That word helps consider the many changing functions of colleges and universities over time that no one could do justice to in a single essay or response. Griffey focused on the quality of faculty jobs, which he rightly considers connected to teaching. Balleisen brought up community colleges’ importance to local economic development but really emphasized the research coming out of leading universities. Potter and Newfield added an even fuller picture of the inequalities impossible to ignore during the pandemic but intimately linked to the many different purposes and constituencies that colleges and universities have served since the colonial era, including slaveowners, homesteaders, military leaders, corporate executives, and elected officials, who were all a part of the public that the Wisconsin Idea and Clark Kerr's multiversities were meant to serve.The historic complexity and multiple uses of US postsecondary schools has made charting their history a challenge. The statistics that Balleisen and Griffey highlight are only part of the story that, as Potter's response emphasizes, has global dimensions. I did go back and check the statistics that Griffey challenged, which came from earlier studies and summaries of AAUP data than he used. Similarly, both our numbers are a little off from what Potter and Newfield included from even more recent surveys.Data disagreements actually reiterate the importance of and challenge of tracking how and why money has been allocated and spent. That work goes beyond the impressive statistics that both Balleisen and I include about the increase in federal, state, and private support in general and research in particular. Those raw numbers obscure the complicated financing behind it and how it was spent, particularly how the Johnson administration designed the loan program to hide its expense. The dramatic fights on campuses and in surrounding communities, state legislatures, and national halls of power over what uses of the university were worthy of support, how they should be underwritten, and whom they should serve had long-term consequences. They shaped the public distrust that Balleisen noted; enabled the gig-ification of campus work (not just for the faculty that Griffey highlighted); left students and families, particularly those of color, drowning in debt, as Potter reiterated; and imperiled the future of the many campuses that have not benefited as much from federal research money. That targeted support has not been able to fund the many important uses and needs of the relatively small number of venerable campuses, like Duke, that have historically received the lion's share. Balleisen celebrated that, by 2018, 135 campuses benefited from $40 billion in federal research support, a noticeable increase from the small percentage of campuses, mostly in the Northeast, that administrators across the country accused of hogging federal resources in the 1950s and 1960s.3Yet the Biden administration's recent proposals underscore that far more postsecondary institutions still need federal research support. I share Newfield's pessimism about the Biden administration as well as Potter's fears about my employer's future. A struggling women's college merged with Loyola University Chicago in the early 1990s, which impacted students, staff, and faculty and continues to reshape its Northside neighborhood, one of the country's most diverse, as administrators endeavor to build a collegiate community capable of competing for students and donors.4Griffey considers “the stakes” low in the debate over what to label these institutions and the innumerable forces, though it should be people, complicit in the intertwined college debt and campus financial crises. Words and analogies matter. The “scholar activists” to whom Griffey refers use neoliberal as a provocative shorthand worth confronting, particularly if it left Balleisen to conclude that I was arguing colleges and universities have always been neoliberal. Not at all, but they have been a part of this country's colonial and industrial past and its postindustrial present, not separate from such base concerns as business and politics but integral to how they evolved and would shape and reshape colleges and universities. Neoliberal, “a much-used and -abused term,” as Potter quipped, is now a part of scholarly and activist lingua franca. But the changing definitions and uses of neoliberal, which Angus Burgin only began to chart in The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression (2012), matter.5 Contemporary uses, as laid out by Potter and Griffey, often do not account for how much this divestment in the public and weakening of basic rights build on the systemic inequalities and power struggles that have been a part of the history of this country and its postsecondary institutions, as both Potter and Newfield noted.Newfield also emphasized the danger of harking back to older moments of reform in clamoring for change today. Both he and Griffey are a part of Academe's special issue on the New Deal for Higher Education. Work and elder-care overload forced me to turn down guest editor Eileen Boris's invitation, but her and Annelise Orleck's introduction mentioned that there wasn't really the kind of encompassing bailout, support, or restructuring that often comes to mind when scholars and journalists invoke the Roosevelt administration.6 Such admissions have been a welcome change to the widespread, mainstream, and progressive hopes for a new New Deal after Obama's election and, more recently, a Green New Deal. Journalists for both left and moderate outlets now frequently mention the complicity of 1930s experiments in today's inequality, particularly with regard to housing segregation.7 But Newfield went further by pointing out midcentury liberals’ emphasis on work and interest in finance laid important groundwork for the policies and proposals now categorized as neoliberal. Federal preference for assisting students with paying for tuition (general revenue used to make up for what targeted research support and gifts cannot) had dire ramifications for campuses still expected to fulfill a variety of uses, despite the declining public faith that Balleisen emphasized.It can be “depressing,” as Potter admitted, but it doesn't have to be. We all agreed something must be done, and there is a lot in American higher education's present and actual past—not gauzy memories of what Newfield called its “Golden Age”—that point toward the possibility of a more equitable future. Newfield offered an important, critical perspective of the original work-study program, which should not detract, as he emphasized, from the remarkable achievements of the young people who embraced that opportunity to study and defied widespread assumptions that race, class, religion, ethnicity, country of origin, or sex had anything to do with a person's ability to excel in school. Work-studiers along with 2.2 million GIs helped make the case for mass public higher education, which didn't mean the end of small, tuition-dependent institutions, like the ones where Potter and I teach.Additional midcentury public options actually included private institutions, such as the University of Buffalo (UB), first chartered as a for-profit institution in the antebellum era. Rockefeller administration officials infamously relied on a lot of creative financing to expand the State University of New York (SUNY) system in the 1960s, which included UB merging with SUNY. That word merging was fitting. UB was hardly being nationalized or made public, descriptions at odds with American federalism and the public-private character of American policies and institutions. That campus's closure, which had seemed possible for years, would have had a devasting impact on western New York, which had already lost a lot of manufacturing investment and had many residents desperate to go back to school.8There's also precedent for the kind of broad-based activist and electoral political movement that both Potter and I imagine. Buffalo, like so many other campuses, had increasingly global connections. Yet local residents, students, staff, faculty, and administrators did a lot to democratize it and other SUNY campuses. Balleisen has a lot of reverence for the self-governance that has steadily disappeared on campuses that once agreed to comply with AAUP standards and promised to offer the equal educational opportunities required by law. But local residents did a lot to protest how and where UB's second campus would be built, construction unions demanded better pay for the monumental task, students struggled to safeguard free speech, and, years later, graduate students, staff, and faculty across SUNY would fight for union recognition and bargain for contracts, just like I did as a graduate student and Griffey continues to do as a lecturer.9The University of Buffalo's history captures how fights for any measurable change on an individual campus or across the incredibly varied American postsecondary ecosystem have and must be waged on campuses, in surrounding communities, in legislatures, and on Capitol Hill. Newfield's analysis of liberal complicity made me regret how much I could not include about the many Americans who fought liberals over work-study, the GI Bill, free speech on campuses, the expansion of the state university systems, federal education aid, and cracking down on predatory student lenders. Some of the solutions that Balleisen mentions have perpetually died in Congress, including the Australian method of having the government collect what students owe through the tax system. Lawmakers and presidents have considered this idea since the 1970s, when support could be found across the political spectrum in Congress for a reform not well-known outside education and political circles. Republican interest evaporated in the 1990s during the standoffs between congressional conservatives and a Democratic White House that many now consider packed with neoliberals. But the Clinton administration's hopes of the IRS collecting student loans was just one beltway fight that highlights how higher education was a part of, not separate from, the economic, political, and social concerns that many have insisted have been and should remain separate from the so-called life of the mind.10Colleges and universities have never been isolated ivory towers and cannot live up to the Wisconsin Idea, Balleisen emphasized, or to California's tuition-free Master Plan unless faculty, staff, and students reckon with these institutions’ historic role in reifying and even widening structural inequalities. That work goes beyond land acknowledgments and monuments to the slaves that built or were used to finance campuses. Restorative justice requires more reconsideration of colleges and universities place in this country's past and then thoroughly examining what can be done on the local and campus level as well as lobbying for the state and federal aid necessary to keep students and parents from having to bear so much of the cost of public goods that serve a variety of uses, regardless of a campus's status as public or private. That government aid should come with rules that would control the costs that concern Griffey and provide the workplace protections that would improve everyone's job quality and security, which would benefit the teaching Griffey prizes and the research Ballesien celebrates. Newfield has every reason to suspect the Biden administration “will try to fix the system on the cheap,” despite the intriguing possibilities for direct funding tied to tenure-track jobs in the College for All Act and for empowering union organization through the PRO Act.11Turning colleges and universities into model employers in today's gig economy does not detract from the research conducted or the instruction provided. It would be a progressive turn in the tradition of, as Newfield noted, “college as job training.” Remaking US campuses would put them, as Griffey concluded, “at the heart of struggles to develop alternatives to neoliberalism,” making them models for the postsecondary schools around the world that have been attacked for the neoliberal characteristics that Potter highlighted. These struggles won't be easy, but, rather than being depressing, these fights can be energizing if we take the “Yes, they can” attitude that Potter suggests.