Divided Conversations: Identities, Leadership, and Change in Public Higher Education

2. Learning the Language: Faculty Beliefs, Values, and Identities

31 Chapter 2 Learning the Language Faculty Beliefs, Values, and Identities For students, graduate school is all about competition: competing to get into the best program, competing to gain funding, competing for advisers, competing to be the best student in the class. Some programs are more or less structured to intensify competitive pressures on students. As Paul, a senior faculty member in the social sciences at Small Rural Flagship recalled, his master’s program at a large midwestern state university typically enrolled far more students than it intended to graduate. The weeding-out pressures led students to feel the competition intensely. He recounted a story some decades later of having been attacked physically by another graduate student in the program, an act that he attributed to the hypercompetitive environment that was created. At his doctoral institution , on the other hand, he found the atmosphere much more conducive to working cooperatively. Although a traditional graduate program in many respects, the department did not use a weeding-out process, and student retention was much higher. There, he developed close relationships with his fellow students that he still keeps up today. Strikingly, this doctoral program also had a commitment to teaching—and to teaching graduate students how to teach. While the former experience is an extreme one, most graduate programs contain an element of competitive pressure. Over the past several decades, federal funding for graduate students has declined (Cohen 2005; Schuster and Finkelstein 2006; Siegfried and Stock 1999), leaving students increasingly reliant on faculty research grants and whatever funds 32 Divided Conversations departments and colleges can commit to students. And even if students have a relatively supportive graduate program, gain access to good faculty mentors, and develop close relationships with their fellow students— which is often the case—the job market is increasingly challenging. On completion of their PhDs, at least in the traditional disciplines, students compete with each other for scarce faculty positions. From 1970 to 2003, the total number of full-time tenure track faculty positions grew from 369,000 to 630,000. At the same time, from 1970 to 2001, the number of doctorates produced by American universities increased, from just under 25,000 per year in 1970 to just over 40,000 per year in 2001 (Schuster and Finkelstein 2006, 164). Even if many degree recipients do not seek a faculty position, this still leaves substantial numbers competing for some 240,000 tenure track jobs. In the sciences, PhD students increasingly expect to spend one or more years in postdoctoral positions (Smith-Doerr 2006). According to the National Science Foundation, the number of postdocs has risen since 1996 by 52 percent for foreign nationals and by 9 percent for U.S. citizens and permanent residents. In 2005–2006, nearly thirty-five thousand PhDs in science and engineering were employed in postdoctoral positions (Oliver 2007). Outside of a few high-demand professional fields, like nursing, engineering , and business, the academic job market is essentially an employers’ market. For the most part, the faculty members who were hired in the expansion of the 1960s were not replaced as they retired, at least not all of them, and not by full-time faculty. The longed-for opening up of jobs in the 1990s and the sellers’ market predicted by some labor economists never happened (see, for example, Gamson, Finnegan, and Youn 1990), at least not on a large scale in the public university system. This means that new PhDs must compete for a shrinking number of jobs, and have done so for the last several decades. Under these conditions, students are acutely aware of the prestige and ranking of their doctoral-granting institutions , and most students find jobs in institutions that are very different from the ones in which they have studied. These market pressures have real implications for faculty life. After all, this is an industry that is highly tuned to minute differences in prestige and to the privileges that prestige brings (reduced teaching loads, funding for travel, and so forth)—and in which prestige can matter more than money (for a cogent analysis, see Caesar 1991; see also Rhode 2006). And while most of us either assume or Learning the Language 33 pretend that the system is highly meritocratic, in fact, the tightness of the job market and the class-inflected way in which individuals get sorted into undergraduate and graduate institutions means that many potentially excellent scholars...