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

  • Christopher Newfield
Harvard University Press: 2008. 408 pp. $29.95, £19.95, €22.50 9780674028173 | ISBN: 978-0-6740-2817-3

Higher education in the United States is shared between public and private institutions. The former, such as the University of Michigan or the University of California, receive annual funding from their states. The latter, such as Stanford University or Harvard, rely on private revenue sources, especially student fees and income from endowments. Both types compete for research grants from the federal and state governments. The public universities were founded and are funded by their respective states to promote the public interest, especially agricultural, economic and social development.

In his book Unmaking the Public University, Christopher Newfield, professor of English at the University of California in Santa Barbara, draws attention to the drop in funding for public universities since the 1970s. Its decline, he argues contentiously, is a result of a campaign by “cultural conservatives” who brand these institutions as breeding grounds for a 'liberal' middle class.

Newfield's latest work succeeds his 2003 book Ivy and Industry (Duke University Press), which explored the problematic relationship between business and US universities. He argued that the liberal-arts tradition and capitalist culture are contradictory forces that create conflicts for both the academy and the students who go on to comprise much of the middle class. He challenged the modern North American university to promote the humanities while drawing on the benefits of business organization and dispensing with its negative aspects.

Now, Newfield builds on his earlier work by presenting a complex, historical narrative of a new middle class. The new cohort is composed of multiracial, progressive and upwardly mobile graduates of public universities. They are the knowledge workers in the knowledge economy. The public universities taught them the collaborative working styles, research skills and technical abilities that enabled the success of cutting-edge companies such as those in Silicon Valley, California. Newfield suggests that cultural conservatives targeted this group because they threatened the power of the traditional business and political elites.

Newfield identifies the major adversaries of this new middle class and the public university as the same conservative culture warriors who attacked the liberal influence on campus. His most striking claim is that for the latter, “The ultimate prize was the reduced cost and status of the middle class that the public university created”. Newfield describes how conservatives, in league with powerful figures such as Ronald Reagan, a governor of California and later US president, influenced the reduction of funding for public universities, crippling this new middle class. The author also blames universities for compromising their institutional independence through their business dealings with government and corporations.

Newfield suggests some obvious remedies. Racial equality must be re-established as a primary national goal; the public universities must broaden their access and raise their academic quality; funding must be increased; and human development must be promoted together with economic opportunity. Yet he neglects key issues that are familiar to those engaged in the current debates over public higher education, making his thesis questionable.

A more plausible reason for the decreasing financial support for public universities, for example, is the perennial battle for scarce resources in state-government budgets. Public higher education must compete for funds with escalating health-care costs, increasing primary- and secondary-school needs, and rising demands by other government agencies. Thus, public universities have responded by supplementing their state funds through additional fund-raising, joint projects with private companies and higher student fees.

Newfield gives only one passing reference to the important and growing phenomenon of community colleges, which offer two-year academic and vocational degrees to students who cannot or choose not to attend a four-year course at a college or university. Nationally, there are approximately 6.7 million community-college students, and a significant number move on to further study on four-year degree programmes. Given that community colleges serve as a major gateway to a senior college education, this is a critical omission in the book.

Another weakness is the lack of historical background. Unlike privately funded institutions, state funding has made economic development an integral part of the public university's mission for their home state. Prominent in this regard are the 'land grant' universities created by the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, which were required to emphasize instruction in the agricultural and mechanical arts and sciences.

One could get the impression from reading Unmaking the Public University that the cultural battle has been one-sided. The book makes no mention of the major national higher-educational organizations such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, or the American Council on Education, which have led the fight for the funding of public higher education at local, state and national levels.

Has the public university been unmade and Newfield's new middle class damaged? Hardly. Government funding has decreased in public universities, but they still have a critical role in US society. In the prestigious Association of American Universities, composed of the 60 leading research universities in the nation, more than half are public. The middle class is suffering some economic reversals, but the reasons are complex. Public higher education will continue to have a leading role in providing access to a good-quality education at an affordable price, for those who wish to improve their standard of living and quality of life.