Higher Education in 2050: A Tale of Four Futures?

While many of us have been focused on rebuilding the existing public university system, most of the rest of the world has moved on. This talk examines the existing university model in its decline along with three alternatives that have been developed by different groups with different interests. All three alternative models build on existing trends by moving much of higher learning outside of the university. I’ll compare these models.  Then we can then discuss their strengths and weaknesses—and where we would like to see higher education go from here.

Christopher Newfield (Emeritus Professor, UCSB English Department), is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation and was Distinguished Professor of Literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he taught for thirty years. His areas of research are Critical University Studies, literary criticism, quantification studies, innovation studies, the intellectual and social effects of the humanities, and U.S. cultural history before the Civil War and after World War II. His current research project involves the nature and effects of literary knowledge.  He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016). His research on universities emerged from practical experience with university planning and budgeting through the University of California’s academic senate. He is co-author of What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021) and is co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical (University of Chicago Press, 2021). He has served as co-PI on multi-year grants from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has co-authored a film, What Happened to Solar Innovation? He also writes about American intellectual and cultural history (The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America, University of Chicago Press), and has co-edited Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press) with Avery F. Gordon. He is currently president of the Modern Languages Association. He blogs on higher education policy at Remaking the University and has written for the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, WonkHE (UK), The Guardian’s Higher Education Network, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.