Christopher Newfield

Christopher Newfield is Professor of Literature and American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Much of his research is in Critical University Studies, which links his enduring concern with humanities teaching to the study of how higher education continues to be re-shaped by industry and other economic forces. His most recent books on this subject are Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008), and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003). A new book on the post-2008 struggles of public universities to rebuild their social missions, called The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in November 2016. He also writes about American intellectual and social history (The Emerson Effect, University of Chicago Press, 1996), and has co-edited Mapping Multiculturalism (University of Minnesota Press, 1996) with Avery F. Gordon. He blogs on higher education policy at Remaking the University, and writes for the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He teaches courses in Detective Fiction, Noir California, Contemporary US Literature, Innovation Theory, and English Majoring After College.