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C H A P T E R F O U R The Changing Complexion of Faculty Work The general pressures on American higher education over the past decade to reduce costs and expand faculty productivity have translated into imperatives for faculty to do “more”—especially to ratchet up efforts that contribute directly to the improvement of undergraduate education. In other words, the heat has been turned up to refocus faculty attention on student learning and thereby reverse what is commonly perceived to be the inexorably expanding claim of research , at the expense of teaching, virtually throughout the academy. There are numerous signs that these vectors are significantly altering the trajectory of academic careers; among the indicators are changes in the topography of growth away from the elite research sectors, gravitating toward the teaching-oriented institutions; movement away from the traditional liberal arts fields to applied, career-oriented venues; the increasing feminization of the academic profession; and the associated infusion of more feminized academic values (particularly, a greater accent on teaching and on students). Another powerful trend (more closely examined in chapter 7) is the dramatic movement away from traditional tenure-track appointments and toward more circumscribed, specialized appointments , especially teaching-only appointments. A host of interconnected issues bear directly on the changing nature of faculty work. For instance, Has faculty work—what faculty members actually do on the job—changed substantially, or perhaps just at the edges, during the past three decades? More broadly, in what ways and to what extent has the “academic revolution,” as chronicled and celebrated by Jencks and Riesman (1968), been maintained, or even advanced, at the onset of the twenty-first century? A related question is, Has the workaday life of the faculty resisted the pressures to upgrade teaching and, instead, continued to pay homage to the research ethos? In other words, are there signs that the academic revolution has peaked and that a reversion is evident in some critical dimensions of academic life? Or is there evidence to suggest that the “revolution” is now being undermined by “counterrevolutionary” developments, that is, a return of the pendulum away from scholarly pursuits and away from faculty control over the university’s academic core? We ask also whether the model of academic work that crystallized in the second half of the twentieth century—featuring the prototypical “regular ” faculty member who is concomitantly engaged in teaching, research, and service—is perhaps yielding to a kind of respecialization of academic work, this time not so much by academic subfield as by academic function. Before addressing these more sophisticated issues of change and continuity in the faculty work role, let us make sure that we have a common understanding of the baseline, the basic constellation of activities that have since World War II been subsumed as part of the faculty work role. The components of academic work have, of course, multiplied and differentiated themselves historically . There have always been internal (to the campus organization) and external (off-campus) components of faculty work. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the major internal components included the conduct of recitations for a class of students during the day and their supervision and discipline in the dormitories (see chapter 2). The external component included ministerial work in the community (of which the campus was an important part) and sometimes various sorts of scientific or naturalistic work, usually pursued as a hobby. With the rise of the American university and, in particular, the emergence of the student personnel movement, faculty had begun by the early twentieth century “offloading” much of their responsibility for student discipline and dormitory supervision and taking on new responsibilities for research and institutional governance (Haggerty and Works, 1939). They kept their service role in their local host communities; its primary focus shifted, however, from organized religion to civic participation and cultural leadership, and faculty took on new and highly differentiated external service to their discipline and the cause of higher education. Early on, there was fairly wide variation in these components by type of institution and academic field. The university faculty did more research and publishing ; the college and community college faculty, more institutional governance and local community service, respectively. The natural scientists did more research; social scientists worked in government and industry; and the educators , nurses, and physicians worked in clinical settings. By the beginning of the period of our focus, 1969, academic work, especially at the more complex 76 T H E F A...

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