What Ever Happened to the Faculty?: Drift and Decision in Higher Education (review)

A series of essays united by the broad theme of the faculty's role in American higher education, this book combines personal experience with analysis. Mary Burgan, professor emerita of English at Indiana University and former general secretary of the American Association of University Professors, writes with long experience in academe.

Burgan's stance is quite critical of many of the trends in American higher education, including much of the distance education movement, the for-profits and the marketization of many aspects of higher education, the "winner take all" trends in faculty rewards and hiring, the attacks on tenure, and others. She is particularly concerned with the deleterious effects of these trends on the academic profession—the overarching concern of the book. Burgan is a traditional liberal and her perspectives reflect the overall approach of the AAUP. Given the domination of much of the debate on higher education by the perspectives reflected in the Spellings Commission report, it is heartening to have an alternative voice.

Burgan's point of departure is, indeed, to defend traditional faculty values and to argue that much of the current criticism of academe is exaggerated, although she does present a generally balanced picture. She is critical of what she sees as a faculty "buy-in" to an increasingly competitive atmosphere on campus and to an overemphasis on research. She harks back to what she sees as a period of community on campus—a time when the faculty itself was more unified and when "shared governance" was the guiding principle of university management.

What Ever Happened to the Faculty? focuses on some central themes. Burgan is a defender of the traditional liberal arts curriculum and, in a chapter on the curriculum, spends most of her time criticizing conservative commentators who have claimed that the curriculum has a politically liberal bias. She is also critical of the "managerialism" of university administration and argues that shared governance is a better approach: It keeps the faculty engaged in the problems that universities and colleges face rather than increasingly being spectators.

A thoughtful chapter concerning online education critiques this new trend. Burgan argues that online instruction often removes any sense of community from the teaching-learning process, and she wonders about the quality of much of it. She points out that much money has been spent on less than successful online ventures and is uneasy about accreditors for so quickly and uncritically approving programs of all kinds without careful evaluation. She also points out the profit motive of many online ventures—not only of the for-profits that have been active in this field but also of some traditional universities that offer online degrees.

Several chapters focus on traditional faculty issues—academic freedom, academic competition, and the growing number of part-time faculty. The issues discussed here—including a growing emphasis on "superstar" faculty while ignoring the rest, the commercialization of scientific research, and the tenure debate—have been discussed to some extent in the literature, but it is useful to have these issues brought together in a fairly comprehensive way. The book concludes with several positive case studies of colleges and universities that have put into place policies and practices showing that academic institutions can work effectively and still respect traditional academic values.

What Ever Happened to the Faculty? is well written. Burgan writes with conviction and marshals a good deal of evidence to support her arguments. She also draws from her own long career in teaching and with the AAUP. The book is more of a series of essays than a closely argued, research-driven analysis. Many of these themes are more thoroughly analyzed in Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein's The American Faculty (2006). Burgan provides a nuanced liberal defense of American higher education and a critique of some of the arguments of the conservatives. But at the end, there is little new analysis here. The...