Academe brings faculty the latest news and thought-provoking commentary

Public universities are in crisis. The November–December issue of Academe, the third in a series considering the current state of higher education, offers an overview of conditions at prominent public universities in Arizona, Washington, Connecticut, and California as well as a perspective from a leading arts and social sciences university in Britain. Each of the contributors provides a brief sketch of budget conditions at his or her institution before describing the educational effects of those conditions. Together, the articles make clear that the public university’s funding crisis cannot be repaired within the present funding model—the crisis is not simply one of revenue decline but also one of revenue deployment.

Elizabeth D. Capaldi, provost at Arizona State University, shows in her article that cuts to public funding have materially reduced instructional and research capacity and that the already high efficiency of public universities needs to be widely recognized if the major social contributions of those institutions are not to be further diminished.

Bruce Burgett, writing from the Bothell campus of the University of Washington, describes the unusually severe budget cuts and correspondingly large tuition hikes that have afflicted higher education in Washington State. He argues that the cynicism of the current crop of public-private alliances needs to be set against a social-justice vision of public higher education.

Brutal cuts to public support are occurring across the Atlantic as well. Les Back argues that the motivation for the massive cuts in teaching grants for British universities is not to save government money during a fiscal crisis but to turn higher education into a market good to be paid for largely through loans.

Gaye Tuchman reviews the effects of comparatively small budget cuts at the University of Connecticut. She finds that they have damaged the ability of UConn’s faculty to ground institutional decisions in their own professional standards.

The final article, by Joel Norris of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, confronts the problem of unsustainable extramural research funding at public universities. Norris argues that the entrepreneurial and “on-spec” approach to grant seeking undermine the conditions that supported the postwar golden age of American science. He calls for a change of course.

Rounding out the issue are book reviews by Janet Zandy and Jonathan Prude, a profile of Stetson University’s AAUP chapter, and columns by Mayra Besosa, Martin Snyder, and Cary Nelson.

As always, Academe welcomes your comments. Send your thoughts to academe@aaup.org.

—Christopher Newfield, guest editor