SOCIAL SCIENCES

The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them

by Christopher Newfield
Johns Hopkins. Nov. 2016. 432p. illus. notes. index. ISBN 9781421421629. $32.95; ebk. ISBN 9781421421636. ED
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U.S. public colleges and universities are currently being challenged by high tuition and decreased learning, even as they are needed to "rebuild a multiracial middle class." Newfield's (literature & American studies, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Unmaking the Public University) book is about how the conventional wisdom of "US public colleges [being] weakened by public funding and public sector thinking" is wrong. Rather than focusing on why this has happened, the author concentrates on how it happened and can be fixed. Newfield successfully argues that the current problems can be traced back to neoliberals and the movement toward the privatization and commercialization of the public education system beginning in the 1980s. He rounds out this work by providing ideas for a new framework that will start to fix these issues.
VERDICT A well-written and readable work in the area of critical university studies, this book will be of interest to academics and general readers wanting more information on the causes of current issues in today's public educational institutions.
Reviewed by John Sandstrom, New Mexico State Univ. Lib., Las Cruces , Nov 15, 2016
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