English professor Christopher Newfield spends a lot of time thinking about public higher education. He’s worried about it. America’s public college system, he says, is in a shambles, with students paying higher tuitions for less learning. The conventional thinking is that public sector practices are to blame, but Newfield argues that the increasing privatization of our universities is the real problem. He joins us Tuesday to explain how we wrecked public universities and how we can fix them.
Christopher Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has written several books about America's public university system, including Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. His new book is called The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them [Independent bookstores|Amazon].
