Public disappointment with universities has reached epidemic proportions, and a common complaint is that they do a poor job of preparing students to find a job, especially given how much they cost. Christopher Newfield, today’s leading scholar of Critical University Studies, will address this in his talk “Jobs and Universities: A Tale of Two Futures” Thursday, May 23, 2024 in the Knight Library Browsing Room as the 2023–24 Cressman Lecturer.
Newfield agrees with the critics that universities are ineffective as job training programs—this is not what universities are meant to do. While a BA clearly helps graduates find good employment, the focus on jobs has perversely hurt the educational core that allows this—intensive learning of complex knowledge in a range of situations and fields. Newfield contends that business and government should be held responsible for employment, and universities held responsible for learning. The partnership between society and higher education needs a radical overhaul, and Newfield suggests why universities need to focus on solving the world’s enormously difficult problems, and how they can best educate people to do this.
Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. Formerly, he was Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Critical University Studies brings deep analytical reflection to the conditions of higher education, to identify root causes and solutions, to feed academic experience into public policy, and to articulate sustainable forms of universities in all their international diversity.
A central issue in Newfield’s research in this field is the knowledge crisis in the United States (and elsewhere), in which we seem not to know enough to solve our most dangerous problems, yet struggle to apply what we do know.
Newfield has recently published two books on the metrics of higher education: Metrics That Matter: Counting What’s Really Important to College Students (2023) and The Limits of the Numerical: The Abuses and Uses of Quantification (2022).
This lecture is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed: youtube.com/@ISMediaServicesUO.