The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them, by Christopher Newfield

David Bell takes offence at the disrespect for academic managers he claims to find in my book, The Great Mistake. But he gets my point backwards. I argue that a set of policy axioms and practices have hardened over time into a vicious cycle of diminishing returns that managers don’t control. My purpose in writing a whole book was to detail structural causalities and their unintended consequences so that anyone who cares about universities can appreciate the unsustainability of the overall US. system and weigh new options. Bell may not be entirely familiar with what has happened in the U.S., and he hangs his review on whether my book has applicability to the U.K. I would have preferred that he invite UK readers to decide for themselves whether the US case has relevance, or at least made reference to one obvious point of comparison: graduate debt. UK policies have created a nearly instantaneous student debt problem, requiring only four years to build debt levels that took the US forty years to achieve. My analysis shows that student debt buildup is neither efficient nor necessary, to say nothing of its unfairness. It also shows that measures like freezing the repayment income threshold or cutting maintenance grants are classic symptoms of a decline cycle. As British citizens awaken to headlines like, ‘England degree debt ”highest in English-speaking world,”’ such analyses deserve a hearing. Bell is right that nearly everyone involved in universities believes them to have a public good dimension. But fewer admit that the nonmarket, indirect, and social benefits of universities form the great majority of their value and justify the great majority of their support coming from public funds. Asserting that public funding is “elitist,” in Bell’s phrase, insures the privatization of revenue sources while encouraging the pretense that public and private revenues have comparable goals, rules, and effects. They do not, and the result in the U.S. is a university system that is neither fish nor fowl, has too many masters, too little focus, and, outside the circle of elite private universities, too little money to upgrade instruction and research. The contradictions in the U.S. funding model were hidden during the post-war decades of rapid economic growth. That growth is long since finished, leading to the wrecking of our vision of mass access to high educational quality without regard for ability to pay. It also leads to an urgent need for a new, equitable, sustainable public funding model. It would be nice for Britain were Bell correct that such problems are restricted to the United States. But I do not think he is.