Research overview
For over twenty years, Newfield has focused on the institution of the university and how it affects the distribution of knowledge, resources, and personal capabilities in societies. Existing public policy values higher education largely for their pecuniary benefits to the individual and the economy, yet in reality the majority of the effects of higher education take the form of nonmonetary and also social outcomes. He has developed arguments that aim to undo widespread miseducation about the effects of learning and research, a miseducation that has contributed to problems like student debt and gig teaching on campuses.
Newfield uses his humanities background to study higher ed’s nonpecuniary effects, which is one of the lines of research within Critical University Studies. Over the years, Newfield has analyzed mechanisms of the underdevelopment of many populations in the United States: managerialism; systemic racial inequality; privatized technological development; political anti-humanism; the culture wars on higher learning in conjunction with the defunding of public universities; the absorption of technological invention into the commercialization processes that undermines diverse social uses; misuses of quantification; and the psychological structure of American democracy.
His current project is on the nature and effects of “literary knowledge.”
Emerson & American Culture
In Newfield’s first single-authored book, The Emerson Effect (Chicago, 1996), he studies the nineteenth-century origins of the subjectivity generated by managerialism—what Newfield calls “submissive individualism.” Emersonian “self-reliance” encouraged individuals to compete with peers while submitting to superiors, as long as superior authority took the apparently apolitical, rationalist form later known as managerial.
The Emerson Effect roots managerialism in the liberal individualist’s recoil from the equality that also attracted them — Newfield argues that the US is authoritarian in this managerial sense, in which the competitive individual cedes to superior authority without solidarity among one’s peers.
Building on the exploration of American culture in his first book, Newfield analyzes the role of racial formation in affecting human potential in Mapping Multiculturalism (Minnesota, 1997), which Newfield co-edited with Avery Gordon. The key compromise of the post-Civil War period, that limits American thought, was the layering of racial inequality onto black citizenship. This led to civil rights struggles whose landmark resolutions took a century to achieve (e.g. the Voting Rights Act of 1965) and were complicated and partially undone in the “post-civil rights period” in which we continue to live. Race remains a central part of Newfield’s research.
Critical University Studies
& the Knowledge Crisis
Newfield has led the development of Critical University Studies, a new interdisciplinary field which combines humanities and social science approaches. The field has become increasingly well-recognized in both the US and the UK as offering distinctive, humanities-based analyses of higher education.
Critical University Studies brings deep analytical reflection to the conditions of higher education, to identify root causes and solutions, to feed academic experience into public policy, and to articulate sustainable forms of universities in all their international diversity.
A central issue in Newfield’s research in this field is the knowledge crisis in the United States (and elsewhere), in which we seem not to know enough to solve our most dangerous problems, yet struggle to apply what we do know. He explores this dilemma, among others, writing on the university as an intellectual and social institution in a trilogy of books.
The first in the series, Ivy and Industry (2003), addresses the anti-humanism in U.S. culture that separates economic goals from socio-cultural conditions, assuming the former transcend, measure, and rule the latter. The book examines how American universities have restricted humanism in relation to organizational and economic knowledge.
The second book of the trilogy, Unmaking the Public University (2008), focuses on the culture wars in higher education, examining the connection between the negative cultural and budgetary strategies. The systematic defunding of public universities is rooted in culture wars that aim to: discredit full racial integration and equality, undermine egalitarian definitions of merit, reject non-commercial research, and weaken the status of humanities knowledge.
Newfield’s last book in this series, The Great Mistake (2016), investigates whether the current Anglo-American model for public universities is viable. This model rests on the premise that the era of public funding is over and that the public no longer view the university as a public good, but rather a private good. Newfield shows that, contrary to what advocates believe, this model does not make universities better. Instead, privatization weakens the fiscal health of universities and creates problems, such as student debt and racial educational disparities. In short, this model is unsustainable. Yet this fiscal decline was a choice that can be unchosen; budgeting cannot be separated from social justice in and outside universities. This book uses Critical University Studies to outline a recovery process while answering key questions about the higher education policy.
In his continued involvement with the domain, Newfield started a book series at Johns Hopkins University Press with Jeffrey J. Williams, Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon. The series, called Critical University Studies, is turning this new field into a legible interdiscipline that brings humanities methods to this research arena.
Universities in the Knowledge Economy (UNIKE, 2013-2017)
Newfield was an associate partner in this EU Marie Curie Initial Training Network Grant, based at the University of Aarhaus, Denmark and at five partner universities in Auckland, NZ; Bristol, UK; Ljubljana, Slovenia; Lyon, France; and Porto, Portugal. ITNs are designed to bring large-scale international collaboration to the training of graduate students in interdisciplinary methods. Newfield’s work with this group explored a dozen aspects of the university’s 21st century embedding in a diverse and constantly changing ecosystem of knowledge businesses, government agencies, and new service activities across a range of national university systems.
Innovation Theory: The Case of Thin-Film Solar
This project started in the mid-2000s, around the time that Silicon Valley went crazy for cleantech and prominent venture capitalist John Doerr wept during his TED talk in contemplating the environment that capitalism was leaving his 14-year old daughter. The U.S. innovation system saw itself as the best in the world because it was driven by private investors and return on investment calculations. Would this great system create the post-carbon energy systems that are needed to reverse climate change?
Newfield used the “thin-film” solar industry (post-silicon or “third generation” solar) as a case study. While he was setting up and conducting the first interviews in Germany and the U.S., most of the industry in those countries collapsed. The technology was generally bought by utilities or firms in East Asia, where it remains under development. Why did this happen during the alleged “cleantech” revolution in two wealthy countries with great technologists and the strongest solar industries at the time of the financial crisis? The interviews resulted in an 80 minute film, directed and edited by Zach Horton, “What Happened to Solar Innovation” (2015).
The film shows a joint failure of government and venture capital. VC pulled out when it realized that the high returns they expected would take time, especially in relation to profits then available in Internet investments at the time. Policymakers in the US and Germany let government follow capital withdrawal rather than cutting against it and staying invested for long-term technological development. The state that serves capital rather than staying independent of it is likely to undermine the energy transition of the 2020s. We need to learn the lessons of the West’s solar collapse: maintain long-term government investment; judge and regulate the outputs of private capital allocations; support cultural processes that bring community knowledge and commitment into the development process–bring communities “upstream.”
The film was the final output of an innovation study that began in the Center for Nanotechnology in Society at UC Santa Barbara, which Newfield co-founded and where he served as co-PI from 2005-10.to edit your description
Quantification Studies: The Limits of the Numerical (2015-2019)
Limits of the Numerical studies the impact of metrics and quantification on humanities-based research and on higher education. The research project is an interdisciplinary, international collaboration with three phases that ran from 2015 through 2019.
I. Partnership with the University of Cambridge and the University of Chicago. The humanities center directors at these two universities conducted humanities-based studies of the impact of quantification in health care and climate change. Newfield formed a third group and developed a coordinated study of the impact of quantification in higher education.
II. Residential Research Group at the UC Humanities Research Center, UC Irvine, Spring, 2018. The HRI awarded Newfield an RRG to study “Limits of the Numerical: Metrics and the Humanities in Higher Education.” This research resulted in Limits of the Numerical (2022), which Newfield edited with Anna Alexandrova and Stephen John.
Continued work on the topic gave rise to Metrics that Matter (2023), which Newfield co-authored with Zachary Bleemer, Mukul Kumar, Aashish Mehta, and Chris Muellerleile .
III. In 2017, the NEH awarded Newfield a Collaborative Research Grant RZ-255780-17 (2017-19) for the study of the numerical in the humanities disciplines. Newfield’s co-PI was Laura Mandell, a digital humanist at Texas A&M, and the core group at UCSB included the postdoc Heather Steffen and development economist Aashish Mehta in Global Studies, with Cameron Sublett, a higher education scholar at Pepperdine. The goal was to give humanities scholars better tools for studying the quantified world, and to help them make a stronger contribution to current debates about digital culture and various public policy issues. The group investigated three arenas of quantification: the impact of standard bibliometrics on humanities research and dissemination; modes of humanities learning not captured by formal learning assessment; and the non-market benefits of higher education.
Global Higher Education in 2050: The Scenarios Project (2020)
The UCHRI furnished pilot funding through their “Horizons of the Humanities” Mellon grant, allowing Newfield to convene an international group of higher education scholars with an eye towards launching comparative research that looks beyond the horizons of higher education debates in the Anglophone world.
All of this research is dedicated to the proposition that scholarly rigor can greatly improve the practice of higher education and at the same time elevate public debate.
The conference developed theoretical frameworks to identify a range of futures for higher education that serve their populations.
