In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

* Academic Profession * Wilson Smith Thomas Bender context By the end of the twentieth century, the most important fact about the academic profession in a historical sense was its diversity—of backgrounds, of work environments, and of professional activities (18). The identities of the people who became professors changed in the decades after World War II. The rise of fascism and the advent of war sent hundreds of European academics to the United States, many of whom were international leaders in their fields. They established new disciplines (most notably art history and musicology) in American universities, they brought new methodologies and gave historical and philosophical depth to the social sciences, and they played a vital role in the postwar rise of American science (1). The decades after 1960 saw greater demographic change: the children and grandchildren of immigrants entered academe, African Americans and scholars from other under-represented groups, including Catholics, achieved careers in the academic mainstream. Women were the largest new group to join the professoriate. This pluralizing of academic culture was the product of broad social changes—and it forced further change. Generalization about the profession is impossible, and perhaps for that reason the discussion of the profession almost always finds its modal type at institutions situated at the top of the hierarchy in American higher education. Notions of the ivory tower academic and the much-loved campus Mr. Chips figure continued into the postwar period, but that was becoming nostalgia rather than description. To the extent that the creation and transmission of knowledge, the “university’s invisible product” in the phrase of Clark Kerr, became central to modern American life, the university could not be separated from society, making necessary another round of discussion: Is the American university too utilitarian in curriculum and research, or not enough so? Was academe too much at ease with dominant values, or too far from them (14)? The image of the ivory tower professor disconnected from the world around him does not explain the actual history of the professoriate. Scientists after World War II could not ignore the larger implications of their work, nor were they ignored by government and business—with the Vietnam War, critics of the government began to notice them as well (3). A professional practice that enabled an academic to locate his mental life most of the time in the seventeenth century may have been possible at the beginning of this period, with its relatively homogeneous campus (male, white, mostly from comfortable classes), while families accepted a gender-based division of responsibilities for the tasks of everyday life (2). By the 1960s, however, the work of managing the increasingly typical two-career academic family greatly complicated the relation of the professional and the private aspects of academic lives. Discussion about flexible faculty work schedules notwithstanding, the disparate tasks and vaguely defined obligations produced both practical and psychological challenges (11). One relevant sign for bureaucratized campus duties was the appearance in 1993 of an easy guide to collegiate behavior in the universal faculty committee meeting (16). But efforts to improve the quality of undergraduate education by rethinking its connections to professional practices had little impact. Under pressure, a comprehensive professional model that would still bear upon teaching seemed to be elusive (17). Feeling powerless within the established structures of governance, which by the end of the century had become increasingly corporate in form and style even if these were still recognizably distinct from those in the business world (11), faculty and even graduate assistants turned to unionization. The question of whether faculty or graduate assistants are “labor” is thus a crucial issue. Is a university professor in a unique employment category, demanding unique employment policies (9)? At many public universities there are now faculty unions, something facilitated by state labor codes. Such codes do not apply to private institutions. If their faculty or graduate students were to be determined by the National Labor Relations Board to be labor, not management or student, their right to unionize would be protected. But not otherwise (12). Minority faculty remained in short supply; women became more numerous, but they were employed at lower ranks for lower pay and at institutions of lower prestige (8). The social issues of the larger society became part of the academy as new groups socially marked by categories of race, gender, and socioeconomic status increasingly populated higher institutions. Many teachers who identified with these groups, often themselves similarly labeled, radically rethought teaching methods and aims (5–7). Diversity...

Share