Wrecked: State Politics and the Deinstitutionalization of Public Higher Education

Barrett J. Taylor discusses the relationship between higher education and state politics, analyzing the ways in which partisanship and polarization have generated conflict between these institutions. Growing hostility toward higher education, he argues, has fed a policy agenda of deinstitutionalization, which has encompassed stark divestment from higher education that has been advanced through an attack on the institution’s social foundation of public trust.
Barrett J. Taylor (he/him) is professor and coordinator of the higher education program at the University of North Texas. He studies the relationship between universities and their environments, with attention to state politics and policy, institutional inequality, and the organization of academic work. He is the author of Wrecked (2022) and the coauthor of Unequal Higher Education (2019), both from Rutgers University Press.