What happened to the American University?

What happened to the American University?

The American university is in crisis. Neither the public, the students, nor even the faculty believe in a system that was once the envy of the world. The lack of faith in universities is striking. According to Gallup, the portion of Americans who were “confident” in American higher education dropped from 57 percent to 42 percent between 2015 and 2025. Moreover, only 35 percent of US adults now say that college is “very important,” down from 70 percent in 2013. A poll by Pew likewise found that “7 in 10 Americans now say U.S. higher education is going in the wrong direction. Read Daniel Bessner’s “The Fifth Estate.”

White Collar Discontents

“Money is a kind of poetry,” Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive better known as a poet, once wrote. As metaphors, money and poetry might be improbably alike; they can both transform one thing (time) into something else (a hairclip, a frozen lake). But for Stevens, maybe this equation had a special import. How could someone who wrote that he had “no life except in poetry” explain the incongruous fact that he spent most of his day parsing surety, risk, and fidelity bonds? Another way to ask this question: If most American poets are required to work at another job (such is the condition of an economy that assigns poetry almost no market value), what tools can be marshaled to make that situation tenable—what fantasies get us through the day? Read Julia Case-Levin’s “Daniel Poppick’s Novel of White-Collar Work”