Christopher Newfield’s ‘Great Mistake’
UC Santa Barbara Professor’s Book About Wrecked Public Universities and How To Fix Them
Christopher Newfield’s latest book, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, deserves to be the centerpiece of a serious, sustained public discussion about the place and function of public universities in American society. Students today find themselves in an inverted relationship: paying far more and getting far less, an arrangement that exacerbates income inequality and the viability of the American middle class.
Newfield, a professor of literature and American studies at UC Santa Barbara, has an insider’s perspective on the damage privatization has wrought in public higher education, and he makes the argument — with clear, persuasive writing and well-marshaled facts — that applying a corporate mentality to what should be a public good hasn’t worked for student learning or quality teaching.
After decades of willing cooperation from politicians, policy makers, and university administrators — including budget cuts and staggering tuition increases — public universities no longer see their mission as providing a good that produces both public and private benefits. The idea that publicly funded higher education benefits the larger society has been replaced by a belief that such education is primarily about individual economic gain.
