Rebuilding Public Universities: Thought and Research After the Post-Truth Era

The Zabel Lectures and the Department of English present Christopher Newfield, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Immediate Past President of the Modern Language Association, and Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London.

Since January 2025, the Trump administration has undermined every university revenue source from federal research funding and student loan programs to international student tuition and endowment income. University presidents and boards have not come together to reject these moves as illegal and unjustified. Nor have they withstood or redirected the reputational damage inflicted by allegations of antisemitism and bias.

At the same time, public discontent with the exorbitant cost of college tuition, crushing student debt, and an overemphasis on job training instead of real learning long predates the 2024 presidential election. At the root of higher education’s problems is a faulty financial model that has never been adequate, sustainable, or clearly understood.

In this talk, Professor Newfield offers a vision for how current attacks on higher education present an opportunity to rebuild. Instead of trying to put Humpty-Dumpty back together, university communities can revive the core academic purposes of higher education and provide it with solid financial foundations. Drawing on decades of scholarship and advocacy on behalf of public higher education, Newfield shows how faculty members can actively work to transform universities into institutions that are recognized and supported as public goods.

This is a free event open to the public, co-sponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Center for Premodern Studies, and the Departments of African American & African Studies, American Studies, Chicano & Latino Studies, Communications Studies, French & Italian, History, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and Writing Studies. For questions about accessibility services and the venue, please email [email protected] or call 612-626-1528.

Christopher Newfield is a multidisciplinary scholar focused on critical university studies, literary criticism, quantification studies, innovation studies, the intellectual and social effects of the humanities, and US cultural history before the Civil War and after World War II. He is the author of a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980; Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class; and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.

He is also co-author of What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University and co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical. He wrote about American intellectual and cultural history in The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America and co-edited Mapping Multiculturalism with Avery F. Gordon.

His current research project involves the nature and effects of literary knowledge. He blogs on current higher education policy at Remaking the University and contributes to Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, Guardian Higher Education Network, Boston Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books.