Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class by Christopher Newfield (review)

The 2012 presidential campaign and the entertaining Republican primary season that preceded it clarify the extent to which Christopher Newfield gets it right in his book of four years earlier, Unmaking the Public University (Harvard University Press, 2008, 2011). What is being tracked are long-standing patterns, some of which are four decades in the making, so the material is still quite timely, in a very readable narrative that connects what sometimes seem like disparate and even competing policy discourses and trends.

The core and compelling thesis of Newfield's analysis and book is that, in his words, "the culture wars were economic wars" (p. 6). He traces a connection between successful culture wars on the academy launched by the political right, the interests of conservative economic elites, and the undermining of cultural authority and public support of "knowledge workers" in higher education. The confluence of cultural and economic assaults on the academy was much in evidence during the 2012 campaign. Whether in assaulting Pell Grants as "welfare," critiquing the provision of need-based aid, decrying biased scientists' claims about the existence of human-induced climate change, attacking unproductive public employees, or complaining about unrealistic liberal university professors, neo-conservatives in league with neo-liberals broke the consensus commitment to investing in higher education as a path to a more socially just, culturally rich, and economically vital society.

Not only has the academy been put on the defense, it has come to be defined by many policy makers as the problem, not as the solution, to our social and economic problems—so much so that the principal, if not only, example of bipartisanship in public policy from 2009 to the present has been in an accountability agenda in public higher education. That agenda has taken as its premise, first, a new reality of no new public money and, second, a need for dramatic restructuring of colleges and universities to increase efficiency in ways that are more closely connected to serving the economic needs of the dominant economic classes.

In a careful, thoughtful, systematically unfolding narrative, Newfield walks the reader through a convincing analysis of the links between neo-conservative and neo-liberal critiques of and policies in higher education. The first main section of the book deals with "the discrediting of social equality." Newfield's argument here is that "political correctness" was invented to undermine the threat of the new, more diverse, college-trained majority. As in most of the chapters, the data consist of a 30,000-foot review of sources grounded in memos (including the so-called Powell memo) and texts. But the story reads easily and is spot on. For example, in tracing "the battle for meritocracy," Newfield provides an interesting reading of the different court levels/rulings of the Hopwood case.

In a subsequent section of the book, Newfield traces the ascendance of "market substitutes for general development" in a process that fundamentally transformed the essential public purposes of higher education. A very nice chapter, with striking empirical data on technology transfer, rightly details "the failure of market measures." In the closing chapter of this section of the book, Newfield focuses on three books to capture an emerging consensus about the need for fundamental reforms that accept the "new [financial/economic] realities" of the day. In his words, "We have traced the arguments whereby the culture wars knocked this historic defense of the university out of position, and it was natural enough for academic business to fill the breach" (p. 222).

The two presidential campaigns (2008 and 2012) and the great recession that came as Newfield's book was originally published only amplified the public critique of the university and deepened the growing consensus for change. If anything, it could be said that Newfield underestimated the extent to which the policy discourse of the culture wards would be dominated by neo-conservatives (as...