By: Chris Newfield

Chris Newfield — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 11:55:06 +0000

I really admire the precision and concision of this review– many thanks. I particularly like your last combo formulation of my desire to produce ” in one gesture a materialist analysis of our compromised present and a utopian wish-image of an egalitarian mass university.” I also agree completely that the university does not “deserve a monopoly on intellectual virtue” or activity in general. I’m trying to bring wayward faculty and administrators back to their own professed principles of quasi-egalitarian inclusion. I realize these were often weakly held, and mixed with elitism and a fixation on prestige that led to the pouring of energy into selectivity and the minor–but expensive–forms of distinction that sociologists from Veblen to Bourdieu among many others have described as aiming at stratification rather than democracy. My hope is that at least some of us who have consented to our own anti-democratic decline will be galvanized by the book’s demonstration that privatization doesn’t even function financially, much less socially, intellectually, or ethically. You’re certainly right that Trumpian policies will increase the hostilities. The university’s main hope is to lead with strong public claims rather than with the current weak-public strong-private version that has stopped appealing to its base constituency of working-class / middle-class regular folks. The situation now is so fluid that I think there is more hope than before the election that the democratizing university can gain mass support. For example, “free college” went from a fringe idea to a main plank of a presidential platform in a couple of years. All those pressures and desires for “mass quality” remain. Thanks again for these insights–I will continue to think about what you’ve said.

Comments on: Review of Newfield’s The Great Mistake

By: Chris Newfield