Critical university studies is a field examining the role of higher education in contemporary society and its relation to culture, politics, and labor.
Rather than a uniform group, CUS includes a range of scholars, critics, and activists, among them tenured professors, graduate students, and adjunct instructors.
[2][3] The piece, "An Emerging Field Deconstructs Academe", describes the "new wave of criticism of higher education" that came to the fore in the 1990s and has gained momentum in the ensuing decades.
[2] As Williams notes, criticism of higher education has a strong tradition, and scholars like Heather Steffen have traced CUS's lineage at least to the early 20th century, for example to Thorstein Veblen's The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918) and Upton Sinclair's The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education (1923), which criticize the influence of business principles and Gilded Age wealth on the emerging American university system.
Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) started with a strong statement about higher education, and anti-war and civil rights protests were a major presence on US campuses.
[15][16][17][18] More recently, a second wave of CUS scholars have widened the field's scope to address issues including universities’ reliance on proprietorial technology, the dominance of entrepreneurial values, and globalization.
[38][39] CUS scholars often publish outside of traditional academic outlets, through blogs like Michael Meranze and Christopher Newfield's Remaking the University, as well as through contributions to new media like Jacobin, the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB), Salon and HuffPost.
[40][11] Through such non-traditional outlets, as well as through book publications and academic journal articles, CUS has helped to bring issues like student debt into the mainstream political conversation.
Scholars like Williams, Steffen, and others continue to call for the incorporation of CUS into the undergraduate curriculum, encouraging students to think critically about the institutions in which they find themselves.