Why You Should Listen:
Christopher Newfield says America is undergoing an educational crisis: for the first time in our history, we are graduating a generation that is less well educated than the one that preceded it, and he points to the dissolution of an essential American dream — equal access to a college education — caused, he argues by a conservative strategy to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. He tells the story of a hopeful America emerging from the post-war boom in college access, then traces the gradual emergence of an anti-egalitarian “corporate university,” and will discuss its detrimental impact on racial policies.