Unmaking the Public University

by Newfield, Christopher

• ISBN13: 9780674060364
• ISBN10: 0674060369
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-04-30
• Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr

Summary

An essential American dream-equal access to higher education-was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education#x19;s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities, deceiving the public to serve their own ends. It is a deep and revealing analysis that is long overdue. Newfield carefully describes how this campaign operated, using extensive research into public university archives. He launches the story with the expansive vision of an equitable and creative America that emerged from the post-war boom in college access, and traces the gradual emergence of the anti-egalitarian #x1C;corporate university,#x1D; practices that ranged from racial policies to research budgeting. Newfield shows that the culture wars have actually been an economic war that a conservative coalition in business, government, and academia have waged on that economically necessary but often independent group, the college-educated middle class. Newfield#x19;s research exposes the crucial fact that the culture wars have functioned as a kind of neutron bomb, one that pulverizes the social and culture claims of college grads while leaving their technical expertise untouched. Unmaking the Public University incisively sets the record straight, describing a forty-year economic war waged on the college-educated public, and awakening us to a vision of social development shared by scientists and humanists alike.

Author Biography

Christopher Newfield is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Meaning of a Majoritarian Society
The Three Crises and the Mass Middle Class	p. 19
Declarations of Independence	p. 31
Inventing PC: The War on Equality
The Discrediting of Social Equality	p. 51
The Market Substitute for Cultural Knowledge	p. 68
From Affirmative Action to the New Economy	p. 80
The Battle for Meritocracy	p. 92
Diversity in the Age of Pseudointegration	p. 107
Market Substitutes for General Development
Facing the Knowledge Managers	p. 125
English's Market Retreat	p. 142
The Costs of Accounting	p. 159
The Problem with Privatization	p. 173
The Failure of Market Measures	p. 195
Hiding Culture's Contribution	p. 208
Half-Suffocated Reforms	p. 220
The New War-and After
The Blame-Academia Crowd: Culture War After 9/11	p. 239
Conclusion: Powers of the 100 Percent	p. 265
Appendix: Flaws of the ôLiberal Biasö Campaign	p. 277
Notes	p. 293
Acknowledgments	p. 369
Index	p. 373
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