Public Education

But What If Anti-intellectualism Is Really Bipartisan?

Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class. Christopher Newfield. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008.

The Public University Goes to the Marketplace

Privatizing the Public University: Perspectives from across the Academy. Christopher C. Morphew and Peter D. Eckel, eds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009

From the General Secretary: Private Models, Public Costs

Presidents, governing boards, and policy makers are preaching the gospel of revenue generation. It is not a new gospel. We have witnessed more than three decades of “academic capitalism” extensively promoted by revision of public law and aggressively pursued by institutions engaging in market-like behaviors. Colleges and universities have been increasingly applying market logic to academic decision making (about faculty productivity, program cuts, and what fields of research to invest in) and seeking to grant and fundraise their way up the rankings to some imagined place in the sun.

Save Our Schools

An AAUP delegation participated in the Save Our Schools conference and march in Washington, DC, July 28–30. Although the Save Our Schools movement focuses on K–12 education rather than higher education, its goals are closely aligned with those of the AAUP and the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education.

From the Guest Editor: Rebuilding Public Universities

The articles collected in this guest-edited issue of Academe offer an overview of current conditions at prominent public universities in Arizona, Washington, Connecticut, and California as well as a perspective from a leading arts and social sciences university in Britain. Each of the contributors provides a brief sketch of budget conditions at his or her institution before describing the educational effects of those conditions. As a group, the authors provide a valuable account of the symptoms of the crisis through which public universities are currently passing.

New Universities

For public universities in states like Washington, the temptation to privatize is becoming overwhelming.

The Crisis in Extramural Funding

If state support continues to decline, public research universities will be forced to abandon their historic mission and scientific research for the common good will suffer.

When Billionaires Become Educational Experts

“Venture philanthropists” push for the privatization of public education.

The Private and the Public in Education

Once, when the sun was unassuming, the sky was silent, and only birds flew high, the air was of a slightly different shade of blue. Down on earth was found a breed of men who openly spoke about being their brothers’ keepers. Such are the thoughts that come to us as we wander around our current political landscape: “There once was a time when long-term ‘public’ investment was held in high esteem as a means of maintaining the future of ‘private’ democratic values.” This is the kind of language used today by writers like Louis Menand.

A Journalist's View of the Assault on Public Education

As the united voice of the scholars and teachers at our nation’s colleges and universities, the AAUP has never been more needed than it is today and more crucial to the fierce debate raging across the land, from the poorest public school districts to the most elite private universities, over what American education will look like in the twenty-first century and what role the faculty, the workforce of the education industry, will play.

Pages

Subscribe to Public Education