Season 2: #8 - Chris Newfield, The Great Mistake

Topics Discussed in this Episode:There is too much acceptance and fatalism around institutional politics in higher ed.The cultural history of the white middle class, which benefited from society's largesse, received much for free and thus didn't have the cultural experience of fighting or struggling for what they got.There is a racist aspect to the defunding of government institutions, where support has been removed as demographics have become less white. Submissive individualism is the white middle class's psychological formation. These phenomena have disabled post-1960s university activism. Another reason for the acceptance of institutional politics is the division of faculty into tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty. Faculty have a professional obligation to do some kind of workplace democracy but have abandoned policymaking and the institution is weaker as a result. Service has been feminized, which has split service from institutional politics. There is routinization of administrative work that authorizes defeatism and localism around policy discussions.The white middle class default culture of academia simply does not want to engage in the conflict needed to create change.The student financial aid system is bigoted against new entrants - students of color, first generation students, students from low-income families - because it sets up different financial outcomes and a radicalized caste system between those who do not have to borrow and those who do.Debt-free college for all has to be the primary policy goal and tuition-free public education is the way to get there. Resources Discussed in this Episode:Johns Hopkins University PressChris NewfieldChris Newfield, Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980Chris Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle ClassChris Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We can Fix Them"Limits of the Numerical: Higher Education in the Age of Metrics"Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of AmericaMichael M. Crow and William B. Dabars, The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education Music Credits: “Come Right Here” by Tendinite, licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY-NC-ND license