Sustainable. Resilient. Free.: The Future of Public Higher Education

by John Warner

Overview

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the unsustainability of our public higher education system; in Sustainable. Resilient. Free., author and educator John Warner maps out a path for change.

In 1983, U.S. News and World Report started to rank colleges and universities, throwing them into competition with each other for students and precious resources. Over the course of the next thirty or so years a Reagan-era ethos of privatization and competition turned students into consumers and colleges into businesses. Tuition is unaffordable. Student loan debt is more than $1.6 trillion, and a majority of college faculty work in adjunct positions for low pay and with no security. Colleges exist to enroll students, collect tuition, and hold classes. When learning happens, it is in spite of the system, not because of it. In Sustainable. Resilient. Free., John Warner envisions a future in which our public colleges and universities are reoriented around enhancing the intellectual, social, and economic potentials of students while providing broad-based benefits to the community at large. As Warner explains, it’s not even complicated. It’s no more costly than the current system. We just have to choose to live the values we claim to hold dear.

A critical read for anyone invested in the future of public higher education.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948742955
Publisher:	Belt Publishing
Publication date:	10/27/2020
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	436,329
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Warner is a writer, editor, speaker, teacher, and consultant. Since 2001, he’s held a series of teaching positions at four different institutions, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Tech, Clemson Universityand College of Charleston, where he currently holds the title of faculty affiliate. Warner writes the Just Visiting blog at Inside Higher Ed, where he has become a national voice on issues of faculty labor and writing pedagogy. He also writes a weekly column for the Chicago Tribune on books and reading as his alter ego, The Biblioracle. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.

Table of Contents

Preface: A New Narrative 9

Part I Diagnosis

Chapter 1 An Existential Crisis 17

Chapter 2 Nowhere to Go but Up 27

Chapter 3 The Wrong Turn 35

Chapter 4 Competition Is Bad for Public Higher Education 41

Chapter 5 Public Education is Infrastructure 51

Chapter 6 What about the University of Everywhere? 63

Part II The Cure

Chapter 7 The Possibilities of Tuition-Free Public Higher Education 79

Chapter 8 Mission over Operations 89

Part III Recovery

Chapter 9 Teaching and Learning: The Core of the Sustainable, Resilient, and Free Public Institution 99

Chapter 10 The Other Work of Faculty: Tenure, Governance, Inclusion 111

Chapter 11 Navigating the Culture Wars 125

Part IV Renewal

Chapter 12 Students Are Not the Enemy 141

Chapter 13 What Students Should Learn 151

Chapter 14 The Surveillance-Free Institution 163

Conclusion: Hopes and Dreams and Other Fine Things 173

Appendix: The Chapters I Didn't Write 179

Notes 187

Acknowledgments 205

About the Author 207

Interviews

"A timely book with fresh arguments on how to frame this larger question of who should pay for higher education—and even how we should think about college’s place in American life."—Jeffrey R. Young, EdSurge podcast  

Editorial Reviews

"Warner’s brief volume gets the big questions right, and does it in an accessible, clear and pointed way. It deserves much more attention than it will probably get. A sustainable, resilient and free system of public higher education would benefit everybody, not only those who attend, and we once understood that. Warner’s book helps us understand it again."—Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed

From the Publisher