Feinberg Series Fall Capstone Lecture by Christopher Newfield 

Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation

Public disappointment with universities has reached epidemic proportions: the tuition is too damn high, the student debt is unjust and unaffordable, the job outcomes are unreliable and unliberating. In the Feinberg Series fall capstone, Christopher Newfield, a distinguished scholar who has written extensively on the history of universities, argues that addressing these problems requires a wholesale redefinition of higher education around intellectual and social benefits rather than monetary ones. The talk will identify the role the humanities disciplines play in realizing these benefits, lifting up literary study as a field that has done exemplary work in generating radical thought with great, though misunderstood, public value.  

View full details and register on the Feinberg Series website

Questions? Contact: feinberg@history.umass.edu

BIO

Christopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now director of research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. 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 and as past president of the Modern Language Association. He is co-author of What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023) and co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Newfield 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 Higher Education Network, the Boston Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

THE 2024-25 FEINBERG SERIES

What Are Universities For? Struggles for the Soul of Higher Education

The 2024-25 Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series explores the historical roots of present-day political, economic, and ethical crises in higher education. It is presented by the UMass Amherst Department of History in partnership with numerous co-sponsors. The Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series is made possible thanks to the generosity of UMass Amherst history department alumnus Kenneth R. Feinberg ’67 and associates. www.umass.edu/feinberg 

Visit the Feinberg Series website for a list of this event's co-sponsors. 

Read the History Department Statement on the (Co-)Sponsorship of Events.