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

Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class Reviews

• 
  James Steele

  There was a time when higher education was about personal enrichment. Now the university has been hijacked by business interests to treat all education with a business attitude. If a subject does not translate to some sort of economic gain, it’s a waste of time. Knowledge went solely to improving technology to increase profits. Knowledge that did not tie to profits somehow was marginalized.
  
  Why? Capitalists (that is, the conservatives, the Right) have intentionally transformed the university into a machine that pumps out workers, not thinking individuals. They realized now that America faces actual competition from abroad, people who actually know how to do stuff make up the majority of a corporation, and they will take over the tasks that business owners once did. The solution was to educate the people in a very narrow sense. Keep education from becoming a mind-broadening experience and dilute it to essentially job training and little else. Workers are educated in their specific field, but have no breadth of experience or critical and imaginative thinking. This way the people can still be exploited, they still improve on technology and increase profits, but will submit to business owners as authority and never assert their own power over the process of production.
  
  Really, the book can be summarized best by its concluding chapter, and this in turn can be summarized in one sentence: privatization of the public university is bad.
  
  The university is not a business. Its function has never been businesslike. Education itself cannot always be quantified in terms of investment/return, but since the 1970‘s a new wave of thinking swept the corporate world: profit at any cost, and profit is the only measure of success. Spurred by foreign competition, companies began cutting costs, outsourcing jobs, and merging. As a distraction from the reason for losing jobs, rich businessmen and the politicians they sponsored began saying liberal ideology is killing America.
  
  As budgets were cut to compensate for dwindling tax revenue due to lost jobs and expanded corporate tax loopholes and writeoffs, public services were demonized. Rather than blame their rich benefactors for cutting jobs, these conservatives blamed the poor people for sucking down so much government entitlements, forcing the government to make budget cuts to other areas such as K - 12 education and food stamps. The public university was one target of attack. As its budget was sliced, conservatives were placed in charge of these institutions to make them more businesslike. They took private funds, raised tuition, and kept the programs that favored the business interests of their new donors. Subjects that did not produce immediate returns (such as the arts and history) were downsized, while others (like business and technology) were coddled.
  
  Simply by cutting public funding and replacing it with private funds and a business mindset, the university has transformed from a place of higher learning, culture, and a source of real critical thinking about politics and history, to mere investment/return corporate education. A university should not be run this way, and the author argues that this transition has been as intentional as the creation of the new business model and spiraling inequality in America today. The story of the university’s transformation is the story of America’s transformation.
  
  It’s a very academic read. The author devotes multiple chapters to the topic of Affirmative Action, and he fails to make a point until one of the last pages. He doesn’t explain how affirmative action actually works, or why it works, so how are we supposed to understand why conservative attacks against it are bad? This was the only part of the book I didn’t quite get. I think he’s trying to say conservatives cry out for everything to be equal, but the point of affirmative action is to acknowledge people of minorities do not come from the same backgrounds as most whites. Their schools are not always equal, their homes are not always equal; there must be some other means to compensate for it. The conservative Right insists any discussion on race is uncalled for. As a result of the end of affirmative action, the proportion of black and other minority students at universities has gone down. Conservatives say it’s because those people must deserve it, but by ignoring the other factors and looking purely at the numbers on test scores, it is in effect passive racism. I think that’s his point, but it doesn’t come across in the book.
  
  The rest of his point is fairly clear though: the higher education system has been systematically transformed into a business. It’s not about education for personal enrichment, but profit. The voices of political dissent are quiet now, slaves to the business model of education. Programs that were meant to broaden a person’s mind are minimized while programs that are meant to churn out workers to increase the profits of large corporations are maximized. It is not what the university is supposed to be. Because of the new debt students must take to compete in this new business atmosphere, which values “knowledge” over function, students must take classes that yield a return in the form of a high-paying job. It does not expand their mind, or help culture in any way, only trains them for a narrow, pointless field in finance or business management.
  
  The author could’ve used way fewer words to express his point, and should have collaborated with a journalist to condense parts and make his point in a less roundabout way, but the message underneath is potent. It matches up perfectly with the other material I’ve read on the recent changes in American business. The rich elites are changing the world to protect their position. They don’t like the idea that higher learning opened up to the masses after WWII, and that the majority of the population might get smart enough to unite and demand real social change. Real democracy is a threat to them because majority is supposed to rule, and if the majority of people actually gets smart enough to realize this, they might see that the system is designed to benefit people at the top, not bring society up as a whole. The university, with its un-capitalist policy of open sharing of ideas and multiple points of view, is a threat to the single-minded, conservative view of profit at any cost, and profit is all that matters. The solution is to remake the university to be part of that, and ensure the people it educates serve that end as well. It did not happen by accident.
• 
  Bryan Alexander

  In December I took to social media with a research query: what's a good historical account of how American states have defunded public higher education?  Helpful people came up with one leading candidate: Christopher Newfield's Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (
  Harvard University Press, 2011;
  Goodreads).
  
  It's an ambitious and powerful book, deeply researched, and offering a vital, carefully developed account to satisfy my query.  It's also especially relevant in this year of Ferguson. But its flaws run deep, resulting in a too-narrow vision that ultimately does not sufficiently explain how American states cut funding to public higher education.
  
  First, the thesis and its strengths.  Newfield argues that conservatives launched the culture wars in order to weaken public universities, sapping their public support and enabling their corporatization.  This strategy sought to protect and extend conservative political power, while cutting down to size not only liberal politics but the middle class itself.
  

  To oversimplify somewhat, conservative elites who had been threatened by the postwar rise of the college-educated economic majority have put that majority back in its place.  Their roundabout weapon has been the culture wars on higher education in general, and on progressive cultural trends in the public universities that create and enfranchise the mass middle class.(5)

  
  Already in that passage you can see a strong claim for public higher ed, awarding it a powerful place in shaping American society.   Public universities created the middle class.
  
  Newfield traces this out in extensive detail, starting back in the middle of the 20th century.  Much of Unmaking concerns the ideologies around the culture wars, including careful readings of documents on all sides of those struggles, from
  the Powell memo (53) to Dinesh D'Souza and Arthur Schlesinger.  We review the 1980s and 1990s battles over PC. We see the culture wars driving privatization of education (177) and the rise of knowledge management (141).
  
  Allied to the culture warriors on the right was, for Newfield, a definition of the economy in terms of knowledge instead of production.  This actually boosts the role of finance in shaping all areas of American life (127).  The middle class ends up losing in this new economy (24), and the working class suffers as well: "the working-class... suffered the first wave of deindustrialization.  Their white collar cousins did little to help them..."(4)
  
  The crux of those culture wars, the main battlefield upon which all of these forces could contest, was race.  "Racial inequality and privatization were the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of the counterrevolution." (270)  Unmaking sees conservatives appealing to various forms of white racism, and leading academic restructuring which reduces the economic and social status of whites and hispanics.  Newfield gives a convincing account of how race-based affirmative action's court defeats led to a reduction in the proportion of blacks and hispanics enrolling in higher education (66).  He sees diversity as a weak fallback position, an unchallenging and ultimately conservative-supporting strategy (chapter 7).  In 2015 as we grapple with rising inequality, declining median income, and fallout from anti-black police brutality, this feels like an especially powerful model.
  
  And yet.
  
  It's a model too narrow to stand up to reflection.
  
  To begin with, Newfield's focus on race avoids much of the actual content of the culture wars and the PC battles.  Gender doesn't play a significant role in the book, which would surprise anyone who lived through this period.  Abortion, perhaps the single most powerful mobilizing force on the right since 1980, has no impact.  Immigration is likewise at best a bit player in this account.  Moreover, "race" here doesn't allow Asian-Americans a role - that's a general problem in American discussions of race, but I won't let the author off the hook for it.
  
  This historical tunnel vision reveals other problems.  For Newfield cultural conservatives assert themselves over liberals in the 1980s, triumphing after their defeat in the 1960s and early 70s.  But the late 70s, with its variety of crises, the undoing of the Carter administration, and the walloping suffered by American liberalism, don't exist in the book.  Which makes Reagan's triumph mysterious.  Similarly Unmaking sees the left lose battles in the 1990s, without mentioning the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the enormous blow that dealt to socialism and related political creeds around the world.
  
  The book wants us to pay attention to economics, but doesn't allow for developments beyond its thesis.  So the decline of public funding to public universities drives the middle class down - a large claim, given the long arc of increasing enrollments over the book's timeline.  But other forces, arguably bigger ones, don't have much of an impact.  Globalization orbits quietly around the book's narrative, yet it clearly had enormous impact on American manufacturing jobs.  The decline of unions, especially in the private sector, knocked out that route to the middle class.  The rise of the financial sector to a position of vast economic and political clout occurred outside the range of the culture wars.  Automation as an economic and social force, rather than an ideology, doesn't have an impact.
  
  Without taking these events and developments seriously Newfield's account becomes too narrow to stand.  Worse, it makes the American public a hypnotized and even stupid mass, bereft of agency and inexplicably disagreeing with a shining liberal message.  In fact, Unmaking doesn't spend time with state politics beyond California's, not allowing us to see what other possible decision-making processes could have led 49 other states to decide to reduce public education funding.  Perhaps other topics influences legislatures. Did public health care costs swamp budgets as medical costs grew generally through this period?  How strong was the impact of the escalating war on drugs and the immense prison system?  Unmaking is good on ideology, but poor on basic political science.
  
  I want to dwell on this point a little longer, since it connects with another flaw in the book. Newfield repeatedly argues that the public could not make major decisions or even think politically without the productions of academic humanists.  To cite one example,
  

  [A]fter two decades of culture wars... middle-class whites now lacked the cultural knowledge to link their own prosperity to cross-racial equality.  Not could they link this equality to the social intervention that historically had created it. (121)

  
  It's one thing to celebrate the humanities' contributions to public discourse, and quite another to see them in such an overweening light.  Newfield leaves no room for journalists, popular press writers, religious thinkers, or politicians to add to the national conversation in a non-reactionary way.  Nor does he allow people to just think of this stuff on their own.  It's damningly condescending.
  
  His love of the humanities leads the author into some strange places.  Newfield clearly fights for one side of C.P. Snow's
  two cultures, and has little patience or interest in the other side.  Indeed, he finds Snow too even-handed, and wants us to think in terms of an opposition like this:
  

  a conflict between mathematical algorithms, associated with efficiency and control, and narrative creativity, associated with autonomy, desire, human relations, and human rights. (25)

  
  Humanists versus the evil machine-things, in other words.  Similarly he paraphrases with some approval Lyotard as seeing technology not being interested in "the true, the just, or the beautiful... but to efficiency." (44)  Clearly Newfield doesn't know any hackers, nor listen to STEM practitioners describe their work using concepts of elegance, creativity, desire, etc.
  
  One of the book's strengths is its detailed description of the University of California system over several generations of change.  Clearly we benefit from Newfield's personal experience within that large and influential establishment.  But once again the book becomes too narrow.  We barely see any other states, aside from a short look at the University of Michigan (174ff) (my alma mater).  California is obviously important, yet it's never been a predictive template for the rest of the nation.  Worse, within California Newfield isn't interested in the rest of that public higher education system.  The many California State University campuses and the community college system merit barely any mentions in Unmaking's nearly 300 pages.  At best this is just problematic, and at worst an instance of academic snobbery.
  
  There are smaller problems in the book, nits I couldn't resist picking, and which often instance these larger issues.  Newfield sees the post-WWII period as a fine one for academic freedom (221), somehow ignoring
  Ellen Schrecker's vital work on how universities aided or caved into McCarthyism. He sees Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the World Wide Web as somehow part of Silicon Valley (198), rather than being developed by a British scientist in a Swiss research installation, CERN.  He thinks research universities are deeply concerned with undergraduate teaching, to the point of offering something like personalized, research-based education for everyone (191).  He opines about a well developed internet discourse in... 1979 (45).
  
  So in the end Unmaking the Public University gave me some answers to my question about defunding higher education.  It makes an interesting case about the culture wars and their links to other forces.  Its close readings of political and theoretical texts gave me new insights.  Chapter 13's argument about the humanities being a better financial deal for universities than the sciences is fascinating.  And Newfield clearly lays out solutions to the problems he outlines (265ff).
  
  But his laser-tight focus on the culture wars-neoliberalism-UC complex doesn't shed enough light on how American states decided to privatize public higher education.  Unmaking needs a companion volume in political science or political economy, one that does the hard work of tracking how so many state legislatures not only made the same decision, but carried that choice across decades and all kinds of political vicissitudes.  Is there such a thing?
  
  (
  cross-posted to my blog)
• 
  Jeff

  I think this is a must read for any american. The obvious problem is: it is destined to be read by a very very small class of people: left, progressive academics (this was assigned to my by my doctoral adviser). This has always been the problem with the West: polarized politics getting in the way of socio-cultural advancements.
  
  Still, it's an amazing history of Higher Ed in the 20th century, which resulted in a sustaining of conservative racial and class prejudices leading to a disenfranchisement of the great majority of people. Newfield is succinct and highly analytical in his approach. His thesis: the culture wars (right-wing attacks on notions of equality post-civil rights) developed an agenda to undercut public funding for public universities to marginalize a middle class such institutions helped to create.
  
  I used to tell my students that in the case of hegemony, there wasn't really some old rich white guys sitting in a room figuring out how to harm everyone else. After reading this book, I realize I was wrong: there most certainly was/is. He calls them out.
  
  This book made me angry at almost every page. For a person who does not belong in politics, I realize how much politicians do not belong in education. Still, they're there, and they're destroying democracy in favor of capitalistic enterprise. Newfield does not pull punches, nor does he hide his chagrin. The only drawback is: because few will read this, little will likely catch.
• 
  Patrick Cawiezell

  Newfield sticks to the system that he knows (California) but as a higher education professional I find it dangerous to draw conclusions about the industry as a whole from the experience at top level Research institutions. There are some terrific things happening at all levels of higher education and while the teaching focus of research universities is under attack now, it is important to remember that it was never more than half of the mission of those schools with the other half being original research, something that these institutions still do better than all others.
• 
  Madeline

  Newfield’s book demonstrates two things very well: the superiority of footnotes over endnotes (footnotes are more transparent, this is a book that needs transparency); that the humanities, at least some places, actually subsidize a bunch of academic disciplines because “external funding” is bullshit.
  
  I wish it had been less dull and less focused on California, but it’s certainly enlightening.
  
• 
  Dana

  more like 3.5 stars.
• 
  Carl

  Powerful thoughts from the conclusion:
  
  

  
  The United States in the twenty-first century ... has put the best that it has into its business systems, into buying and selling, into its executive compensation and stock prices, and into the world's most complex and expensive financial architecture. But it has neglected its public systems and done a below-average job with its human capital. The results are mixed, as can be seen in international comparisons of primary and secondary school students, or in healthcare, where the highest costs in the world yield lower-tier public health results in the usual comparison groups. A similar fate has befallen public higher education, where the top keeps climbing higher, and the rest run to stay in place. The middle class that has been cutting public expenditures for college may have thought that it was cutting other people's college, but this has not been the case. There has never been a middle class in history that was not created by public infrastructure—by facilities offering rough equality regardless of personal means. As the middle class cuts public education, it cuts the conditions of its own existence. (271-2)
  
  ...public universities need to insist on the value of understanding societies beyond their status as commercial markets. Although the culture wars sought to restrict the humanities and social science disciplines that seek this understanding, these disciplines will need to play an even stronger role than they have to date. The human sciences must explain in better ways what human development is, why it must be available to everyone, and what social investments and cultural practices will allow it to occur. They will need to explain again the power of the imagination. The imagination is always a kind of revolt, and the humanities fields have a long history of revolts on behalf of human development. These fields are particularly close to the ancient forms of human creativity, to intuitive modes of change, to the quantifiable forces that comprise experience and history. This cultural knowledge and historical experience cannot be reduced to the market-driven model of economic development that U.S. leaders prefer. When public universities represent the public, this is something that they must say, and explain, and extend into the practical modes of life. (274)
  
  Culture-wars values have poisoned the American appreciation of public systems. They have helped the federal government focus increasingly on security and war and see health and education as entitlements to be cut. The corporation has rejected the social contract that enabled its own prosperity for decades. Neither the political nor the business system is currently able to confront the core problem of our time: in a world with six billion people, and four or five billion poor, how do we develop the whole of society and not just a protected minority, societies in which everyone prospers and not just a defensive and self-righteous elite? (275)
  

  
  
  For an analysis of the book as a whole, I recommend
  Bryan Alexander's thoughtful review.
• 
  Rebecca

  I read this book because I heard Newfield give a talk about how the sciences cost universities more (and thus make less money for) universities than do the humanities and social sciences, which are less expensive and produce more tuition revenue. My concern is that this very important chapter, which argues so convincingly against the most frequently used justification for cutting humanities budgets, appears so late in the book that many readers may not get to it, especially because earlier chapters provide a less original (though useful and articulate) discussion of the history of anti-affirmative action campaigns and the culture wars of the 1990s. Despite the occasional slog across well-trod ground, the other chapters often contain valuable new insights, including a striking critique of the MLA capitulation to market logic, a critique of theories of "post-capitalist" utopianism in light of neoliberal realities that isn't dismissive of postmodernism, and an introductory chapter that puts Lyotard and Robert Pirsig side by side.
• 
  nick

  A really good, even necessary, book that I'd recommend especially to folks trying to put the current budget crises and funding cuts into a broader historical and political context. Pays especially close attention to the modes of reasoning demanded by neoliberal capital and how those very modes become the common sense ways of explaining the university's function, even to those on the left who would defend it.
• 
  Jon

  This is an interesting study of the decline of the public university and parallel decline of the middle class.
  From the end of World War Two Public universities provided the means for a
• 
  Laura

  Very broad argument. And sadly, private universities have fallen into many of the same traps.