FHI, Short Residency | "Building the Parallel University: Towards a New Cultural Order": A Conversation with Christopher Newfield and Donald H. Taylor

You are invited to a conversation with Christopher Newfield as part of his Short Residency at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute from January 12, 2026 - January 23, 2026. On Tuesday, January 20, 2026, the FHI will host "Building the Parallel University: Towards a New Cultural Order," a conversation with Newfield and Donald H. Taylor, Professor of Public Policy

Do we need now to create a "shadow university" in parallel with the existing university? If so, what would its features be, and what would it do differently? What kind of higher education would a non-capitalist or socialist or neocommunist society want? We'll discuss ways in which short-term responses to right-wing attacks on universities can be turned into new ideas for better universities and better interventions in the wider society.

Christopher Newfield was Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and is now Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He has written a trilogy of books on the university as an intellectual and social institution: Ivy and Industry: Business and the Making of the American University, 1880-1980 (Duke University Press, 2003); Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Harvard University Press, 2008); and The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), is co-editor of The Limits of the Numerical (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and is co-author of What Metrics Matter? Academic Life in the Quantified University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). His current projects involve the cultures of "AI," literary and cultural knowledge, the future of higher education, and the culture of social equality.

Don Taylor is Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health, Executive Core Faculty Member, Duke-Margolis Institute for Health Policy, and Associate of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society Affiliate, Duke Global Health Institute. Taylor is a health policy scholar who has studied rural health, identification of underserved areas, and the economics of smoking and cessation. For the past 20 years his work has focused on how society cares for the elderly and to what effect on individuals, families, public programs and inter-generational wealth.

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