Opening the Window on Higher Ed: An Interview with Christopher Newfield

Abstract

Opening the Window on Higher Ed:An Interview with Christopher Newfield Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) The cost of college has skyrocketed, limiting access and causing the exponential growth of student debt. This is typically cast as a result of inevitable economic or historical change. Against that complacent view, Christopher Newfield shows how debt and many other current problems in American higher education arise from deliberate policies and politics, and he has become a leading figure in critical university studies. While most university budgets are forbiddingly complicated if not secret, in Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (2008) Newfield traces the money trail and the ways that state universities have been defunded, with support diverted from public uses to private coffers. And while reformers and administrators might target particular problems, in The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (2016) he calls attention to the "devolutionary cycle," with problems like cuts in public funding answered by raising tuition, prompting rising student debt, in turn causing lack of confidence in public education, and so on, in an interlinking spiral. Overall, he argues that we need to reinfuse public higher education and the value of humanistic thinking for human development. Starting as a scholar of American literature, Newfield has focused on cultural politics and ideology, particularly the tension between liberal individualism and democratic equality. That tension is the topic of his first book, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (1996), which analyzes Ralph Waldo Emerson's imprint on American culture, which extols self-reliance but finally encourages "submissive individualism." Through the 1990s, Newfield turned to look at management culture and how it recirculates those values, writing on management theorist Tom Peters. In addition, he co-edited two collections about contemporary cultural politics, After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s (with Ronald Strickland; 1995) and Mapping Multiculturalism (with Avery Gordon; 1996). Relevant to this interview, see also his essays, "What Was 'Political Correctness'?: Race, the Right, and Managerial Democracy in the Humanities" (Critical Inquiry 19.2 [1993]); "Recapturing Academic Business" (Social Text 15.2 [1997]); and "Corporate Culture Wars" (Corporate Futures, ed. George Marcus [1998]). [End Page 743] Over the past two decades, Newfield has focused on the American university. His study of management culture fed into his analysis of the development of the research university in Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (2003). In addition to his books Unmaking the Public University and The Great Mistake, and numerous essays and reports, he also co-founded, co-edits, and sometimes writes for the site, Remaking the University, at http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/, an influential clearinghouse for discussion of contemporary issues and events in higher education, especially in large public systems such as California's. Born in 1958, Newfield grew up in Los Angeles and attended Reed College (BA, 1980) and Cornell University (PhD, 1988). After a brief sojourn at Rice University (1987-89), he taught at UC-Santa Barbara from 1989 to 2020, where he is Distinguished Professor emeritus. Since 2020, he is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. This interview took place on July 16, 2021 via Zoom, with Newfield speaking from London. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams in Pittsburgh, and transcribed by Bethie Wang, an MA in literary and cultural studies from Carnegie Mellon University. Jeffrey J. Williams: Over the past two decades, you have probably been the most persistent critic of higher education from the humanities. Could you encapsulate your analysis of contemporary higher education? Christopher Newfield: One overriding theme has been the shifting away from public to private rationales for higher education, which has been a disaster. This has been happening throughout my career, but was accelerated by the financial crisis. For example, there's been enormous state support for asset prices since the 1980s, starting when Greenspan was head of the Fed, through cheap money—that is, the constant flooding of the financial system whenever market prices start to fall with public dollars. That is very much the opposite of the state's treatment of the public sector...