This is the corrected text of a talk I gave online to the Wayne State University conference, “Public Budgets, Public Good,” on April 30, 2026. Many thanks to the audience, whose questions about theory and practice were excellent. Thanks also to the sponsors: Labor@Wayne, AAUP, HELU, and Public Good U. I’m still sorry I wasn’t there in person.
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I’ve always seen the university as a force for the general development of society, having been influence by a tradition that includes Humboldt & Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Du Bois, John Dewey, CJR James, and many thinkers since. This has made it easier to grasp the fact that the university’s largest effects are a combination of non-monetary and public. These public effects have been rendered “dark matter” by the political and business worlds, which have steered people exclusively toward the private pecuniary effect of the B.A. wage increment over high school. College presidents and other officials have simply echoed them. This is overbearingly true in the US and the UK, and amounts to a mass miseducation about education. But it is also true elsewhere, and apparently in China.
