An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Publi...

A remarkable indictment of how misguided business policies have undermined the American higher education system.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLHigher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracke...

Emphasizing how profoundly the American research university has been shaped by business and the humanities alike, Ivy and Industry is a vital contribution to debates about the corporatization of higher education in the United States. Christopher Newfield traces major trends in the intellectual and institutional history of the research university from 1880 to 1980. He pays particular attention to the connections between the changing forms and demands of American business and the cu...

A remarkable indictment of how misguided business policies have undermined the American higher education system.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLHigher education in America, still thought to be the world leader, is in crisis. University students are falling behind their international peers in attainment, while suffering from unprecedented student debt. For over a decade, the realm of American higher education has been wracke...

Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Following the financial crisis of 2008, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie,” a disgraced ideology that staggered on like an undead monster. After the political ruptures of 2016, commentators were quick to announce “the end” of neoliberalism yet again, pointing to both the global rise of far-right forces and the reinvigoration of democratic socialist politics. But do new political forces sound neoliberalism’s death knell or will th...

Colleges sell themselves by the numbers—rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists—but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to?High school and college students are inundated by indicators and rankings supposedly designed to help them decide where to go to college and what to study once they arrive. In Metrics That Matter, coauthors Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerle...

Colleges sell themselves by the numbers—rankings, returns on investments, and top-ten lists—but these often mislead prospective students. What numbers should they really be paying attention to?High school and college students are inundated by indicators and rankings supposedly designed to help them decide where to go to college and what to study once they arrive. In Metrics That Matter, coauthors Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, Chris Muellerle...

This book resituates the political correctness debates in the humanities branch of the academy. It contends that conservatives have tainted entire academic disciplines to cause university humanists to go from irrelevant to dangerous overnight.

Many in higher education fear that the humanities are facing a crisis. But even if the rhetoric about “crisis” is overblown, humanities departments do face increasing pressure from administrators, politicians, parents, and students. In A New Deal for the Humanities, Gordon Hutner and Feisal G. Mohamed bring together twelve prominent scholars who address the history, the present state, and the future direction of the humanities. These scholars keep the focus on public high...

Proper presentations have the power to persuade and transform people and organizations. This is a book about the art of presenting. Using current knowledge about learning, this book describes best practices for designing, delivering, debriefing, and growing from the presenting experience. Some highlights include how to give a two minute speech, getting comfortable in your own skin, overcoming resistance and audience fatigue, and how to de-demonize the personal digital devices in training r...

This collection examines the uses of quantification in climate science, higher education, and health.Numbers are both controlling and fragile. They drive public policy, figuring into everything from college rankings to vaccine efficacy rates. At the same time, they are frequent objects of obfuscation, manipulation, or outright denial. This timely collection by a diverse group of humanists and social scientists challenges undue reverence or skepticism toward quantif...

This issue of Profession contains Russell A. Berman’s introduction to his Presidential Forum, Language, Literature, Learning, held at the 2012 MLA convention, and the essays of the forum participants Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Christopher Freeburg, Jack Halberstam, B. Venkat Mani, and Imani Perry. To mark the journal’s thirty-fifth anniversary, the issue also features a retrospective sampling of articles that illustrate the evolution of the profession and of the professional issues...