FHI, Short Residency | Christopher Newfield, "The University System in the Knowledge Crisis"
You are invited to a public lecture by Christopher Newfield as part of his Short Residency at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute from January 12, 2026 - January 23, 2026. On Thursday, January 15, 2026 he will deliver "The University System in the Knowledge Crisis" to open his residency.
The modern university was funded and structured for a liberal capitalist system in which professional expertise and scientific knowledge were cultivated to assure U.S. prosperity and global pre-eminence. That system, already exhausted, has in 2025 undergone active dismantling, and all of the university's functions are being challenged at the same time. Where should we go from here? I'll identify four forms of knowledge crisis that emergent or radical forms of academic knowledge are particularly suited to address, especially if directed towards the goal of outlining wholesale cultural transformation in the near future.
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.
This lecture will be followed by lunch.
Free Food and Beverages, Humanities, Lecture/Talk, Research