“Why Don’t Universities Support Racial Equality?”

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Debate about such issues as affirmative action, university reparations and renaming units like the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton have convinced many people that American universities are centers of egalitarian thought and practice about race relations. But is this reputation deserved? This lecture surveys the evidence that universities are now contributing to the resegregation of the United States, discusses why this is happening, and suggests how universities could instead help fix racial disparity.

About the speaker

Christopher Newfield is professor of literature and American Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He brings an interdisciplinary background to the analysis of a range of topics in American Studies, innovation theory, and “critical university studies,” a field which he helped to found. Chris’ books include Mapping Multiculturalism (edited with Avery Gordon), The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (Chicago, 1996), Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke, 2003), and Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard, 2008). His writing covers American political psychology, race relations, the future of solar energy, and the power of humanities-based investigation. He teaches courses on Detective Fiction, Global California, Innovation Studies, Critical Theory, the Future of Higher Education, and English Majoring After College among others. He blogs on higher education funding and policy at Remaking the University, the Huffington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and is completing a book called "Lowered Education: What to Do About Our Downsized Future."