Christopher Newfield will speak about his new book on the post-2008 struggles of public universities to rebuild their social missions, titled The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them.

Newfield is a professor of literature and American studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research in critical university studies links his concern with humanities teaching to the study of how higher education continues to be re-shaped by industry and other economic forces. His other books on this subject are Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, and Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980. He also writes about American intellectual and social history. He blogs on higher education policy and writes for the Huffington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.