What Are the Humanities For?

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.