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A spirited discussion of the state of higher education, the history of criticism, and the future of literary knowledge production, recorded with a live audience at University of Pennsylvania’s English Faculty Lounge as part of the annual Penn English Department Lecture, delivered this year by Christopher Newfield.
Full Cast (in order of appearance): James English, Christopher Newfield, Matt Seybold, Whitney Trettien, Jenny, Zachary Lesser, Mark Algee Hewitt, Kerry McAuliffe, Eilis Lombard, Laura McGrath, Qing (Ruby) Liao
Date Recorded: October 22, 2025
Music: Redd Holt & The Heptet
Sound Engineering: Brian J. Kirk
Featured Guests
Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation. He was formerly Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities, and How We Can Fix Them (Hopkins UP, 2016), Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, (Harvard UP, 2008), Ivy & Industry: The Business & Making of The American University, 1880-1980 (Duke UP, 2004), and The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in America (U Chicago, 1996).
Whitney Trettien is Associate Professor of English and Faculty Director of the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments From The History of Bookwork (U. Minnesota, 2021) and a contributor to many collaborative projects in digital book history.
Episode Bibliography
Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype & Create The Future We Want (HarperCollins, 2025)
Jed Esty, The Future of Decline (Stanford UP, 2022) [Chinese Edition trans. Qing (Ruby) Liao]
Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams & Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI (Penguin, 2025)
Khadija T. Khan, “PhD Cuts Are the Beginning of the End for Academia” Harvard Crimson (October 30, 2025)
Steven Levy, “Fei-Fei Li Started an AI Revolution by Seeing Like an Algorithm” Wired (November 10, 2023)
William C. Mao & Veronica H. Paulus, “Harvard To ‘Significantly’ Reduce Graduate Program Admissions Amid Budget Tightening” Harvard Crimson (October 2, 2025)
Laura B. Mcgrath, Middlemen: Literary Agents & the Making of American Fiction (Princeton UP, 2026)
Christopher Newfield, “Criticism After The Crisis: Toward A National Strategy For Literary & Cultural Study” Representations (Fall 2023)
Christopher Newfield, “Chicago’s Gift To Trump” Remaking The University (August 24, 2025)
Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities, and How We Can Fix Them (Hopkins UP, 2016)
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class, (Harvard UP, 2008)
Christopher Newfield, Ivy & Industry: The Business & Making of The American University, 1880-1980 (Duke UP, 2004)
Christopher Newfield, Anna Kornbluh, & Matt Seybold, “Working Conditions” The American Vandal (January 4, 2023)
Julia Schleck, Dirty Knowledge: Academic Freedom in The Age of Neoliberalism (U. Nebraska, 2022)
Matt Seybold, “Against Technofeudal Education” The American Vandal (June 10, 2025)
Matt Seybold, “The Financial World & The Magical Elixir of Confidence” Aeon (February 19, 2018)
Matt Seybold, “Destroyer of Confidence: James Gordon Bennett, Jacksonian Paranoia, & The Original Confidence Man” American Studies (Fall 2018)
Matt Seybold et al, “Ed Tech, AI, & The Unbundling of Research & Teaching” The American Vandal (November 2, 2023)
Matt Seybold et al, “Newspapers Worse Than Dead (But Print Is A Rent Strike)” The American Vandal (April 5, 2025)
Whitney Trettien, Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments From The History of Bookwork (U. Minnesota, 2021)
Whitney Trettien, “Tracked Reading” in Further Reading (Oxford UP, 2020)
Anna L. Tsing, “On Nonscalability” Common Knowledge (Fall 2012)
Event Copy
One thing Christopher Newfield’s work has enduringly shown is that external defunding of humanities disciplines is inevitably misrepresented as internal crises. Humanities scholars are accused of failing to adequately assert their relevance, agree upon their methods, market themselves to students, or create competitive graduates. Newfield inevitably shows that such arguments fail to hold water even on their own terms, while disguising and revisioning decisions actually made by academic administrators, government officials, and private partners. The most recent wave of humanities cuts have been justified by the imminent automation of language and literature education by artificial intelligence and the allegedly “out of touch” radicalisms of associated faculty. In this conversation, which will be recorded as part of the forthcoming “Vandal Live” series of The American Vandal Podcast, Newfield, Whitney Trettien, and Matt Seybold discuss the incursions of “technofeudal education,” the distinction between technical tools and speculative capital, both subsumed under the title of “A.I.,” and the tactics available to scholars, teachers, and writers when, as Paul Krugman puts it, “the bubble ends: not with a pop, but with smog and brownouts.”
