book notes

Christopher Newfield. The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Uni-

versities and How We Can Fix Them. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP,
2016. 448pp.

Christopher Newfield has written an indispensable book. Out of sheer

doggedness, Newfield (over the past dozen years) has made himself the
primary lay expert (i.e. non-economist and non-administrative official) on
the financing of public higher education. The Great Mistake is his third book
on the subject and provides an incisive, convincing, and terrifying picture of
the current condition of state universities, along with an analysis of how we
got here and how we might repair all the damage that has been done.
The general outlines of the story are familiar enough. State financial
support of higher education has been steadily eroding since the Reagan years.
In aggregate, the U.S. has “reduced per-student tax outlay for public colleges
by about 25 percent since the mid-1980s.” Thus, the declines we have seen
since the turn of the twenty-first century are, to some extent, consistent with
a longer trend. But Newfield identifies four specific dynamics that, if not
entirely new, have intensified over the past fifteen years.
First, the finances of the large public research (“flagship”) universities
created in the crucible of the Cold War have never been understood—or
honestly confronted. Basically, as Newfield has discovered through his
careful audits of the books in the University of California system, research
does not pay for itself. In fact, “funded research” is a money loser, even
with overhead rates above 50%. That research has always been subsidized
by state government support of the public university. Only that support
added to the federal (or other) grant dollars balances the books. Thus, even
as the rankings war (akin to the efforts to top the NCAA basketball or football
rankings) among universities leads them to pursue more and more research
funding, they are digging themselves into a deeper financial hole with each
successful grant. Crucially, it is not the cost of educating students that is the
big financial burden. It is the cost of research. And when state support falls,
that money has to come from somewhere else.
Second, the search for new sources of money got public universities into
the fund-raising game. My own school, the University of North Carolina,
had as few as six fund-raisers as recently as 1990. Our bicentennial campaign
of 1992-1994 represented the first significant fund-raising effort in the
University’s history. As a college president friend of mine told me: “The
daily contradictions of the job are inescapable. I must, as a matter of funda-
mental responsibility, raise money for my college. But every time I success-
fully do so, I am telling the state legislature I can do without their support. I
am the Red Queen, running ever faster to stay in place. Every dollar I raise is
a dollar that the state will not appropriate next year.” Newfield understands

© symploke Vol. 25, Nos. 1-2 (2017) ISSN 1069-0697, 495-593.

495-593.

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568 Book Notes

this dynamic—and the fact that it is universally the lot of top administrators.
The result, he rightfully notes, is that there are no advocates, from within the
universities, for a sustained and sustainable commitment to publicly funded
education. Those leaders accept that private fund-raising is central to (the
absolute top priority of?) their jobs. Everything lines up for the abandon-
ment of the very notion of “public goods.”
Third, the other source of revenue is student tuition. But the real scandal
here is not so much the tuition increases (bad as they are), but the corrupt
way the whole tuition structure has evolved. For starters, the public support
(both federal and state) that still exists for higher education comes increas-
ingly through student aid packages rather than through direct appropriations
to the universities. Those aid packages combine outright grants and loans
in such a way as to encourage (force?) students to go into debt. And that
debt (the Obama administration did reform this system to some extent) was
“owned” by private lenders who secured (among other benefits) statutory
protection against any defaults. Newfield provides all the gory details. The
bottom line is that, even as money is withdrawn from the universities, lots of
money that is supposedly going to finance education is being siphoned off to
what can be fairly called loan sharks.
Finally, the response to this epochal shift in the financing of higher educa-
tion has led, with barely a murmur of protest, to the universal adoption of the
premise that our universities need to be run more like businesses. They need
to become “entrepreneurial,” to develop products for market (licensing and
patents and “spin-off” enterprises), to promote themselves aggressively to
prospective students and donors, and to adopt business models of efficiency
and accountability. For me, the most important contribution of Newfield’s
book is his careful proof that a privatized, marketized (if I can use such a term)
university is more costly and less financially sustainable than the public one
we have dismantled over the past forty years. Privatization is not the cure of
the disease; it is the disease. Why? Partly because it leads to the administra-
tive bloat that so many recent commentators have lamented. Newfield does
the numbers for us and shows that it is not the cost of faculty that is driving
the rising annual budgets of our universities. Thus, the growing army of
non-tenurable, poorly paid instructors are bearing the burden of a huge shift
of costs away from the classroom and toward other expenses incurred by the
corporatized university. Crucially, the key factor is that universities (because
still quasi-public and committed to some extent to “service”) get exploited in
all the new “partnerships” with business and government. The cost-shifting
goes mostly in one direction (toward the university) and any profits in the
other (toward the non-university partner). It’s another case of research, of
non-instructional work done on campuses, not recovering its full costs.
So what is to be done? Newfield persuasively connects his specific tale
to the larger narrative of the general neo-liberal attack on “public goods” and
the emptying out of the American middle class. Our public higher educa-
tion system created that middle class and now is falling victim to the same
Copyright © symplokē 2018
 symplokeˉ 569

reluctance to maintain our infrastructure that gives us a decaying electrical

grid and unsafe bridges. This short-sighted hostility to the sources of pros-
perity has a tight grip on our current political leaders. As mentioned already,
those entrusted with the leadership of our public universities have not taken
it upon themselves to articulate an alternative vision. The tuition-free move-
ment is one glimmer of hope. Newfield’s own vision is a more capacious
recovery of the commitment to education as something that not only serves
the individual students’ interests, but produces general goods (better health,
less crime, economic benefits) hard to achieve by other means. His book
can’t create the partisans who will articulate this vision in the public sphere,
but it certainly provides them with both the hard facts and the overarching
analysis that can underwrite an attempt to reverse “the great mistake” our
society has made.

John McGowan, University of North Carolina

Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters

from the Bastille Archives. Ed. Nancy Luxon. Trans. Thomas Scott-Railton.
Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 331 pp.

This book collects lettres de cachet (letters of arrest) from myriads

of dysfunctional families, as we would call them now. So potent is their
threat, however, the body politic itself appears to be suffering an apocalyptic
death of a million cuts. In fact, they are specially formulaic petitions to the
King and/or his local representatives, to intervene and order the arrest of
debauched husbands or wives, wayward children, bad apprentices, violators
of family honor, all disruptors of affairs, who have not been brought to justice
via the normal system; or, if facing possible legal actions by the usual process,
have evaded final judgment and are still free to wreak havoc with the lives of
ordinary people. An entire rhetoric of how to address the king is on display
in these letters, and the third section of the book lays it out. The other two
sections of the book concern “Marital Discord” and “Parents and Children,”
the vast majority of the topoi of this genre. One cannot help envisioning a
new Dickensian novel when reading these letters.
These materials arise out of the confluence of Michel Foucault’s previous
work on what he termed in a notorious 1970s essay to be “lives of infamous
men.” This epithet refers to dangerous people that the prison system two
hundred or so years ago originally incarcerated and later sought to reform.
Arlette Farge happened to be working on similar materials, focused upon
this discursive practice of lettres de cachet, and the two decided to combine
interests. This book, much delayed, first appeared in French in 1982. It is
now available in English with a useful introduction by the editor explaining
the history of their collaboration and that of the general context in which
the letters were originally composed. There is also a special “Afterword” by
Copyright © symplokē 2018