Author's Response

I am both grateful and humbled by the time that Trevor Griffey, Edward Balleisen, Claire Potter, and Christopher Newfield took to craft their incisive critiques, generous comments, and concerns about American higher education's past, present, and future. I also need to thank Eric Arnesen for asking me to write something provocative about the idea of the neoliberal university in the pandemic's early weeks. He asked for something beyond the more familiar look at the last forty or even sixty years. Months later he managed to pull together a formidable cast of respondents. One reason that Arnesen approached me was Griffey's response to the 2020 LAWCHA Presidential Address that Griffey, an outspoken organizer, mentioned. Balleisen is a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, where he serves as vice provost for interdisciplinary studies overseeing an array of projects, including Versatile Humanists at Duke. Claire Potter was one of the...