STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD MASTER RESEARCH TO SOLVE THE GREAT SOCIETAL PROBLEMS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Research—as Cathy N. Davidson succinctly defines it above—is one of many crucial topics in her compelling new book The New Education. Looking at the literature and data on American universities Davidson describes in her study, I venture that new research could contribute to the public good as long as research universities continue to advance democracy. Theoretical and practical notions of democracy, of course, have evolved remarkably since America's founding, oscillating between the ideological poles of “liberalism” and “illiberalism,” as some pundits have recently put it (Deneen 155–59). For the sense of American democracy anchoring my essay, I have in mind a “deliberative form of politics” that calls on “the demos to reflect upon itself and judge [the efforts of] laws, institutions, and leaders” to maintain the equality of social rights and privileges (Urbinati 16). The democratic prosperity of American society requires an increasingly diverse range of students to conduct new research on behalf of the intellectual and scholarly contributions of universities to the public good.

Cathy N. davidson'S the new education: how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux challenges us to address nonacademics, and to update our teaching, by focusing on the big picture. She calls on us to rise above departmental politics and the tribalism of disciplinary debates. Instead of engaging in those familiar struggles, we should be talking with our neighbors and our elected representatives about the advantages of eliminating letter grades; the virtues of pedagogies that are learner-centered, collaborative, and project-based; the perils of specialization; the damage that departments do by stifling change; the promise of educational technology if divorced from the profit motive; the myth that STEM degrees lead directly to career success; and, of course, the need for public reinvestment in higher education. Each of these talking points draws energy from Davidson's contention that digital media have rendered industrial models of education obsolete.

Cathy N. Davidson's core claim in the new education is fundamentally important: the university system in the united states is undermining itself with a factory-production model that wasn't great in the twentieth century and is dysfunctional in the twenty-first. Whenever they come under political fire, nonelite colleges and universities proclaim their eagerness to Taylorize student learning—make it more efficient with tighter process control— through the more rigorous application of output measures like cost per unit and time to degree. hey regulate learning with grades and bell curves, which we now know do not neutrally measure learning but systematically favor some types of students over other types. Even worse, they apply stock forms of evaluation that not only mismeasure learning but actively reduce it. Whatever money standardization saves in the short run is lost many times over in the long run through limited learning and reduced creativity in the millions of graduates cranked out by this restricted and outdated system.

For cathy n. davidson, university education is equivalent to job preparation, which is not to say that she is talking about vocational training in the usual sense—the training, say, of medical technicians or park rangers, computer programmers or hotel personnel. On the contrary, her “new education” is designed as broadly as possible to be a replacement of the old liberal arts paradigm. The soaring cost of college education, she argues, will not decrease until public officials can be convinced that four (or even two) years of “university” training “can provide exactly the analytical and cross-cutting interdisciplinary thinking and communication skills that are most in demand in a complex workplace” (185). Goodbye, accordingly, to the traditional curriculum that has been in force for over a hundred years, goodbye to “passive, hierarchical models of teaching and learning” (103), to individual majors (and minors) like English, history, economics, or chemistry, with their lecture courses and discussion sessions, their final exams and pop quizzes, and welcome to the new world of “student-centered,” “project-based” “learning,” to the classroom “where students learn how to learn” (263).

Cathy N. Davidson's the new education: how to revolutionize the university to prepare students for a world in flux joins a rapidly growing genre that calls on society and its leaders to revolutionize education at all levels to prepare children and young adults for a fast-changing world. his genre includes the former Harvard University president Derek Bok's The Struggle to Reform Our Colleges (2017) and the Northeastern University president Joseph E. Aoun's Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (2017). But whereas Bok focuses on why so little has changed in education despite the pressing need for radical transformation and Aoun introduces the new discipline of “humanics” as a means for higher education to prepare students for an era when professions are rapidly disappearing, Davidson highlights the widening gap between a rapidly changing society and an educational system that has not kept pace. Davidson supports her theoretical arguments with case studies of programs from institutions that are paving the way for a new education.

I am deeply grateful to wai chee dimock for organizing this feature and to the distinguished scholars who have given generously of their time and attention to address the issues raised and solutions offered by The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux. No reader of PMLA needs to be reminded that our discipline and our departments are under duress, our majors plummeting just as we are being asked to teach more service courses with higher numbers of students and fewer faculty lines. his is a bleak time in higher education and for our field. Yet it is inspiring to witness the dedication and seriousness of all those fighting for higher education as a public good while also working to ensure that higher education addresses the needs of the public.