The Attack on Higher Education
The Dissolution of the American University

Compares the current right-wing attack on American higher education to Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1535.

Ronald G. Musto (Author)

9781108471923, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 January 2022

370 pages
23.5 x 16 x 2.5 cm, 0.68 kg

American higher education is under attack today as never before. A growing right-wing narrative portrays academia as corrupt, irrelevant, costly, and dangerous to both students and the nation. Budget cuts, attacks on liberal arts and humanities disciplines, faculty layoffs and retrenchments, technology displacements, corporatization, and campus closings have accelerated over the past decade. In this timely volume, Ronald Musto draws on historical precedent - Henry VIII's dissolution of British monasteries in the 1530s - for his study of the current threats to American higher education. He shows how a triad of forces - authority, separateness, and innovation - enabled monasteries to succeed, and then suddenly and unexpectedly to fail. Musto applies this analogy to contemporary academia. Despite higher education's vital centrality to American culture and economy, a powerful, anti-liberal narrative is severely damaging its reputation among parents, voters, and politicians. Musto offers a comprehensive account of this narrative from the mid-twentieth century to the present, as well as a new set of arguments to counter criticisms and rebuild the image of higher education.

Part I. Historical Background: 1. Medieval monasteries
2. The university in Europe
3. The American University to 1968
4. The retreat from 1968
Part II. Dissolution? Introduction: 5. Governance and boards
6. Budget wars
7. The scandal of academe
8. Exchanging beliefs: the anti-enlightenment, from humanities to technologies
9. Transformations, takeovers, closings
10. Conclusions: new directions?

Subject Areas: Public administration [JPP], Universities [JNMN], Colleges of higher education [JNMH], Higher & further education, tertiary education [JNM], Funding of education & student finance [JNKG], Admissions procedures [JNKA], Education [JN]