Christopher Newfield

Jurassic U: The State of University-Industry Relations

itself, but never have they been as widespread as they are these days. Nearly everyone assumes that the university has entered a new era, and many feel that the university’s traditions of public service and academic freedom are threatened. The era’s formal starting point was the 1980 passage of the federal Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities for the first time to retain title to the inventions of their employees. The intent of the legislation was to give universities financial incentives to patent useful technologies, ones that would then be licensed to an industry partner in exchange for royalties on sales.1 The act’s supporters argued that the profit motive would enhance the search for new knowledge by linking it to market goals, and the claim that the act promoted entrepreneurship helped it prevail over some prominent opposition.2 By the year 2000, university-industry relations seemed all-encompassing. Athletes had become human billboards for sporting goods companies while their coaches collected large endorsement fees. Student centers had assumed most of the functions of suburban shopping malls, and a large portion of campus Internet traffic was devoted to consumer uses like downloading music files. Universities marketed themselves as prestige brands to the most affluent demographic and raised tuition rates so consistently that graduates carried credit card debt to rival the ever-increasing size of their student loans. From coast to coast, campus life seemed as much about buying stuff as about learning things. After two decades of marketing tie-ins, fiscal crises, and financial incentives, commerce had moved from the edges to the core of the academic mission. By the late 1980s, critiques of corporate research funding had begun to arrive from the battlegrounds of academic commerce. The president of Harvard University, Derek C. Bok, wrote that contemporary pressures were endangering the university’s social mission.3 The president of Yale University, A. Bartlett Giamatti, claimed that commercialization placed faculty members at odds with their academic responsibilities. He described a growing tension between “the private, proprietary corporation, whose norms are competition, efficiency, and ‘profit maximization,’ and whose goals are short-term, and the traditional university, which is nonprofit, and Christopher Newfield Jurassic U

The End of the American Funding Model: What Comes Next?

The United States has long been seen as the worlds leader in higher education, but in fact its academic outcomes have been stagnating or falling for years. Newfield shows that the current funding model for higher education is not the solution to this educational crisis but its source. Using datasets recently compiled by scholars with unusual access to student records, he demonstrates that underachievement is directly tied to underfunding. The antiegalitarian effects of the current American Funding Model cause the decline of U.S. educational attainment. But why do educational leaders face little resistance from faculty in perpetuating the current funding system? In part this is because faculty mistakenly believe that their own interests are served by the current system. In fact, Newfield shows, the current funding model also creates inequities in research funding that have done particular damage to the humanities. Both overall national educational attainment and advanced academic research will be improved by building funding structures with egalitarian procedures and goals-which require greatly expanded public funding-and faculty will need to adopt egalitarian values in order to improve national education and to fix their own institutions.

The structure and silence of the cognotariat

This paper describes the most likely social structure awaiting ‘knowledge workers’ in the knowledge economies of high‐ and medium‐income nations. Commentators from across the political spectrum and in diverse institutional positions have been noting that the source of new products and industries is increasingly ‘cognitive’. They have been concluding from this that knowledge workers are in effect knowledge capitalists who will either own, and/or control, the economy, and will gradually acquire the economic power historically allotted to owners, shareholders and top executives. The paper analyses the discourse of ‘knowledge management’ in conjunction with the structure of higher education’s primary disciplines to argue that in fact knowledge workers are divided into traditional social groups. Only a small ‘creative class’ will achieve control or creative freedom, and they will achieve this largely because of their direct institutional connections to the owners and executives who run the knowledge economy. There are no signs that the current economy is redistributing economic authority in a more egalitarian way, nor are knowledge workers showing signs of political mobilisation against this traditional stratification.

Aftermath of the MOOC Wars: Can Commercial Vendors Support Creative Higher Education?.

The large-scale massive open online course (xMOOC) rose to prominence in 2012–13 on the promise that its outcomes would be better and cheaper than those of face-to-face university instruction. By late 2013, xMOOC educational claims had been largely discredited, though policy interest in ed-tech carried on. What can we learn about the future of ed-tech by analysing this eighteen-month period in higher education history? This article gathers different types of evidence to suggest several conclusions: MOOC momentum was propelled by an administrative failure to apply due diligence to xMOOC educational claims. The MOOC path was also smoothed by a confusion among key commentators between xMOOCs and small-scale ‘connectivity’ MOOCs that did show meaningful learning outcomes. At the same time, online courses do not overcome race-based disparities of outcome and in some cases make them worse. In addition, student use of online courses appears to be instrumental, even cynical, further limiting their educational value. MOOCs will be back in modified form to endanger educational equity and quality unless faculty members articulate explicit goals and standards for public higher education to which ed-tech can be held accountable.

Can American Studies Do Economics

The international financial crisis that surfaced in August 2007 has done the impossible convinced large portions of the U.S. public and the media that U.S. economic policy has major flaws. It is now a little easier than it was in 2006 or 1996 to find mainstream criticism of Wall Streets impact on the economy, of wage stagnation and job insecurity, of very high levels of economic inequality, and of glaring racial disparities in measures such as family assets and mortgage defaults. At the same time, the critics do not generally believe that flawed U.S. economic policies indicate a flawed U.S. economic model. Most of them attribute various crises to excessive Bush II pandering to its favored special interests big pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, oil corporations, the wealthiest 1 percent, among others. Tax cuts for the rich, installment of the Medicare prescription plan, inadequate support for renewable energy research these are discrete policy mistakes that could, in most accounts, be redressed by Democratic-party-style reforms on topics where polls indicate that solid majorities are fed up with Republican positions. Little of the commentary is suggesting the need for a structural redesign of American capitalism, or is criticizing capitalism as such. Even Naomi Kleins The Shock Doctrine, the most widely circulated recent left-wing critique of U.S. economic policy, attacks extreme capitalism rather than capitalism itself.

The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan

Whatever one might think of the merits of such a desegregationist position (to characterize it favorably), or of the ‘‘identity politics’’ to which it is evidently opposed, Bell’s closing salvo reflects his own methodological bias— his determination to direct our attention to the individuals and the interests behind any given text. Despite our field’s known omphaloskeptic tendencies, such professional self-examination as called for here remains essential to the continued vitality of literary studies. As is probably clear, Culture, Genre, and Literary Vocation invites us to regard it, no less than any other book, as an artifact existing in a dense network of social relations involving publishers, readers, doctors, friends, and reviewers. A coincidence Bell might have appreciated, for instance, is that he opens the book by responding to a review of his previous book (The Problem of American Realism) by a colleague of the current reviewer, who in turn is reviewing Bell’s collection for a journal edited by one of the critics Bell takes to task. But there are other, more important, stories here: about Bell’s desire to get more exposure for the Cambridge monograph; about the work he thought most worthy of collecting; about his sense of his ‘‘subject position’’ vis-à-vis African American literature. These are stories that even people already familiar with the reprinted materials in Bell’s book can learn from, and that seem not only to invite but to justify Bell’s own methodology.