A Professor at the End of Time: The Work and Future of the Professoriate by John Best (review)

A Professor at the End of Time is an intriguing book title. It may prompt you to think this book will be a fiction novel about a scholarly time traveler. In fact, this book is "an account unlike any other" (p. 6) that documents one professor's experiences and perspectives on his work that span a period from the golden age of higher education through the transition into the technological era. His intent is to write a "compelling story" for future researchers to use as a reference and archive for what happened to one typical professor across a 34-year career in higher education. His work adds another valuable piece to the literature on the changing roles and future of the professoriate. Although the book does not necessarily add any radically new information in the on-going discussion of the past and predicted future for professors, professor Best does a great job in laying out in a logical and readable form the forces that have created change. The book content is split between both the actual work done by professor Best and the effects that technology had in changing that work throughout the second half of his career. [End Page E-3]

Professor Best begins with an opening chapter that introduces us to the terminology and the methodology that will be used in the following six chapters. He divides the time since 1945 to his retirement in 2013 into two major eras, with a transitional period in the middle that centers on the turn of the 21^st century. The years after World War II form the Golden Age of higher education where the numbers of students and professors are increasing and the value of a 4-year degree is unquestioned. But this euphoric period does not last forever. Starting in the 1980s, the author documents a shift from a time when the professors were the center of higher education to a new time he calls the Technology Era. In this era, new forces arise that strip the golden age professors of their former centrality. In addition to the disruptive effects of technology, there are pervasive influences generated by cost structure change that modify what work the professor must do. Chapter 1 also introduces the author's belief that higher education is split into two systems: the elite system of selective, private funded, research-focused universities and the industrial-scale system serving the other 90% of students, publicly funded, and with a teaching focus. He believes it is primarily the industrial-scale schools who are threatened by the shift to the technological era.

In Chapter 2, the author documents the work of professors as teachers in the golden age. The author provides data from his extensive archives, and anecdotes from his teaching, to illustrate the way teaching occurred in this timeframe. He explains the steady rhythm of a professor compressing vast amounts of information into teaching notes, the professor expanding on those notes during class time, the students compressing the information into their own notes, and then students expanding on the information in study. This compression-expansion model of teaching is familiar to anyone who obtained a degree in the golden era. New professors learned this model of teaching and gained proficiency in teaching mostly through on the job training rather than any formal education in how to teach. Professors were also tasked with supervising and directing students through the process of research and writing. The author reminds us that for professors in this period, "college teaching is an exhausting profession" (p. 49).

Moving out of the golden era, the professoriate has experiences a change in how it accomplishes its work. Chapter 3 documents the changes technological advances have wrought for both professors and students. The major change is a shift from working to be the provider of a...