‘It’s Easier to Kludge It’

Much of what you believe about public higher education in this country is wrong, according to Christopher Newfield, and those misunderstandings are destroying it.

That might not be a surprising perspective from a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, as many faculty members at state colleges have become vocal critics of how their institutions are run. But Mr. Newfield has made a second career of what he calls critical university studies. His third book in the field, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press), out last month, arrives at a time when even casual observers can see that public higher education is in trouble.

The book doesn’t describe a single moment or policy decision that led to the fateful collision of public disinvestment and rising tuition that has staggered state colleges. Instead, Mr. Newfield blames the cumulative effect of private interests prioritized over the public good. Over the past 30 years, broadly accessible, high-quality education got less attention, he says, than individual graduates’ job prospects and earnings. Reduced state support was supposed to help make public universities more efficient but has instead left them less effective at fulfilling their missions. Americans have saved money on taxes, only to spend it to pay rising tuition bills.

Many of the assumptions about public colleges that ordinary citizens, elected officials, and even senior administrators hold are exactly backward, Mr. Newfield argues. And while the country aims to raise the number of graduates, public colleges are less able than ever to do that.

Mr. Newfield spoke with The Chronicle about his new book, the need to re-examine support for public colleges, and the barriers that stand in the way.

I was struck by how much conventional wisdom about public higher education you upended in your book, or at least showed to be perhaps not quite as wise as it seems.

The paradigm we have now is a disaster. We’re not just narrowing the point of university study but also undermining the financial viability of the whole operation. It’s really become the worst of both worlds, both the financial side and the educational side.

There are a lot of numbers in the book that show how it wouldn’t cost that much to fix it financially. Another $22 a year from the median taxpayer in California would essentially roll the entire system back to the year 2000, which means fees at UC going from $12,000 a year to $5,000 a year, while restoring the operating budget to 2000 levels.

It’s a psychological and philosophical barrier more than it is a financial one. A lot of the book is really about the philosophical, psychological, and social public benefits we would get if we went forward to this better model. The big one is just a more enlightened and creative population, where these kinds of high-end abilities that we value so much when they come out of Stanford can be seen across the entire educational system.

What is a lit prof who went to Reed College and Cornell’s private graduate school doing writing about public higher education?

Well, it all started with Ralph Waldo Emerson. My first book was about him. I saw him as a hinge between private psychology and institutional life. That book, The Emerson Effect, was about his construction of a form of subjectivity that would work in the large organizations that were emerging. He was ahead of his time. I called it “corporate individualism,” or “submissive individualism,” where somebody has to be autonomous but obedient to larger forces.

So I was already thinking about how organizational behavior and private life interact. Then, when I got my second job, which is this one, it was at the beginning of the going-on-30-year period of cuts in public higher education. My first merit increase was given to me, and then confiscated, because the university didn’t have enough money to pay the $600 times the number of people who got the raise.

I got interested in the relationship between tax policy and other kinds of priorities — rising health-care costs, prison costs, that kind of thing. And it just went on from there.

Impassioned defenses of the liberal arts are fairly common in academe these days, but your appeal is different from the typical argument.

My simple take is that the liberal arts are indispensable to solving every one of the problems that we now see as technical. To the extent that it has been impoverished as a research field, and to the extent that it’s been highly adjuncted as a teaching field, it’s unable to make a public intellectual and social contribution in the way that it could. It’s being hamstrung by poverty within institutions, where it makes more money than it receives.

The big story here is that we as a society are avoiding talking about the thing that has made the big difference in reducing higher education’s effectiveness. And that is the relative poverty of public colleges. Not compared to other countries, but compared to what we used to have. Society rightly wants a lot from us, and it wants more, in fact, in the current economy, which requires creative capabilities, etc., and not just rule-following. We’re investing less in actually producing that.

While most universities tout big research dollars as if they equaled profit for the institution, you point out that most research loses money for colleges, just like most football programs do. How does that work?

There are direct costs and indirect costs, and the outside sponsor never pays enough of the indirect costs. This is fairly standard data that nobody looks at. The loss, in the sense that the institution has to make up for indirect costs, is about 19 cents on the extramural dollar.

Which can add up to millions.

Yeah, so the bigger your grant gross revenue is, the more you lose, the more you have to find it internally. When there was a lot of money coming from the state, that was OK, because students weren’t subsidizing research without being asked.

We should have more STEM research, not less. I’m all for it. But people need to be told what’s happening, and then they need to be asked their views, and the university has never done either of those things.

I don’t know the situation in every state, obviously, but I’ve followed California pretty carefully, and I know it was our policy to just talk about undergraduate teaching with the legislature because the assumption was that they didn’t care about anything else. They didn’t care about graduate programs, they didn’t care about professional schools, really — health and medicine, but that’s it. And they didn’t think research was something they needed to pay attention to because the feds were doing that. State legislators can’t be asked to fill in budget holes that they don’t know exist.

Your depiction in the book of university administrators isn’t particularly flattering. Is it really that bad?

I don’t think it’s a problem with individuals. It’s a systemic issue. They’re caught inside of a paradigm that’s mostly not of their own making, and it’s a risky thing to try to get out of that, and to counter it. It’s lower risk to work within it and just do the best that you can. It’s easier to kludge it.

Now that you’ve written a couple of books (and many blog posts) that are somewhat critical of higher education, do administrators stop talking when you show up?

Actually, just in the last year, I’ve met presidents and chancellors who say: “We’re really interested in what you’re doing. And we want you to know we’re not just ignoring what you’re saying. But we need to strategize about how to get the message out there.”

And I understand the problem. They’re dealing with boards of trustees that have all the assumptions I’m trying to expose in this book, and they’re also dealing with legislatures that have a really great deal with the current system. Because you can complain about high tuition and look like a populist — and maintain low taxes by cutting the university, which then is forced to raise tuition, which you can then complain about. It’s a really great political setup.

In the book, you argue that people who consider Academically Adrift a simple critique of higher education misread it. How so?

Well, the authors weren’t saying that students don’t learn in general. They were saying that students under current conditions don’t learn. For me, if you look at their data, you see that it’s students in poor schools, and non-liberal-arts-and-sciences majors, who aren’t learning.

The fix to limited learning is not to disaggregate university systems and vocationalize them, because those are basically the things that caused the problem in the first place. The solution is to move vocational courses to the level of liberal arts and sciences in terms of the intensity of their learning, and to fund the poor colleges up, at the level of the colleges that are producing learning gains on a mass scale.

One bit of conventional wisdom about public higher education is that state support is never coming back, at least not at the levels seen a decade or two ago. You disagree, though, right?

People are realizing what the cost is: unaffordable student debt and lowering quality unless we raise tuition, which would then increase debt.

The Grover Norquist era of arguing that the private sector does everything better than the public sector, which is inefficient and a burden and just a vehicle for the self-interest of liberals, has had concrete financial and educational consequences that people now see to be negative. The public is willing to reverse engineer, to move backward and say, “Oh, OK, that argument produced these negative consequences, so we no longer act on that argument.”

A concrete example of this is that, two or three years ago, my colleague Bob Samuels wrote that book Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free. In his words, he was a lone, crazy voice in the wilderness. A year and a half later, Bernie Sanders picked it up as his official platform. And it’s been modified somewhat, but still taken into the Clinton campaign. I have real concerns about how they would implement this, but the principle shows a sea change.

You teach courses in detective fiction and California noir. What do you think Philip Marlowe or Jake Gittes would make of the shadowy conundrum of public higher education today?

They would find it utterly predictable. For Marlowe and Gittes, it’s human nature to try to take more out than you’re putting in.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Lee Gardner writes about the management of colleges and universities, higher-education marketing, and other topics. Follow him on Twitter @_lee_g, or email him at lee.gardner@chronicle.com.