Christopher Newfield

I think this book is a necessary part of the conversation of fixing higher ed. But I had a hard time connecting to it in this post-45, in-the-midst-of-Covid era. I also had a hard time relating any of the content to my experiences as a tenured professor at a community college. (He makes one offhand comment about how CC's are totally fucked or something, I'm obviously paraphrasing, and then pretty much just dismisses them.)

YES so many issues result from lack of public funding and the idea that college degrees are worthless if they don't earn us money. But missing from this book is the right-wing takeover of boards of education. Undermentioned was the administrative bloat that commands high six-figure salaries each while replacing full-time faculty with hoards of underpaid adjuncts. Completely ignored was the effect of teaching unions on any of this.

And I could have lived without his preachy diatribe against lectures and for "mastery learning." Leave us to our own pedagogies, please. Academic freedom means I know how to run my classroom better than you do, Professor Newfield.

The best part was the discussion against MOOCs. I've been in higher ed long enough to have been through so many of the fads that are "totally going to change education" that wind up being short-lived wastes of instructional budgets. But since teaching hybrid and switching back to face-to-face (FINALLY) post-Covid, I know firsthand how poorly remote instruction serves students, especially the ones that the author is most concerned about. And yet, those administrators looking to justify their $250,000/year are going to keep coming up with new fixes that don't address the deeper issues.

Overall, worth a read.… (más)

I don't understand why, but Newfield, in this otherwise well-researched and argued book, seems allergic to the word "neoliberalism." Since he's examining its effects, he ends up describing again & again the concentration of wealth & power in the hands of a very few, the corporatization of higher education, the increase in workload, but does so using the same long phrases and arguments -- all of which could be avoided by saying "neoliberalism." It seems like a quibble, but by the time you hit the middle of the book and he's minutely explaining how neoliberalism works --again-- it gets a little ridiculous. Using the word would allow this book to connect to so much other sociopolitical thought, would allow Newfield to deepen his argument, moving it from the repetitively descriptive to the probingly analytic.

Having said all that, Newfield does let readers outside of academia in on how awful it's become for faculty and students. And make no mistake: higher education in the US, particularly in the Humanities, is a nightmare. But if you're in higher ed, there's nothing new or surprising here; you can probably name at least two colleagues who've confessed to crying jags, so what Newfield describes is familiar. This is an important book; I just wish it was a more rigorous one.… (más)