Marshall Steinbaum and David Austin Walsh at The Hedgehog Review:
Surveying the wreckage of public higher education from the vantage point of 2026 to find where it all went wrong, those of us who don’t subscribe to the traditionalist views of the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. often fall back on a certain standard narrative. According to this popular account, the generously funded postwar public higher-education systems took off with the GI Bill, gathered momentum with the Sputnik-triggered space race and the access-expanding California Master Plan of 1960, and reached a peak with the federal Higher Education Act of 1965, only to founder on the shoals of neoliberal austerity, de-professionalization of the faculty, tuition hikes, and student debt. Hostile political actors, the story continues, lashing back against what they saw as out-of-control sixties-era campus politics, dethroned tenured and tenure-track faculty from a meaningful role in shared governance in favor of business interests and logic, undermining the academic and social-justice missions of the university in favor of a single-minded focus on career readiness.
This narrative is largely true. But it begs for qualification.
More here.
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