The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers

11. What’s Ahead? Agendas for Policy Analysis, Research, and Action on Academic Staffing

C H A P T E R E L E V E N What’s Ahead? Agendas for Policy Analysis, Research, and Action on Academic Staffing We began with the observation that American higher education—and higher education throughout most of the rest of the world—is undergoing a swift and sweeping transformation. The pace and scope of change, across so many basic features of higher education, is, we contend, unprecedented. And we believe that these changes are taking place at such a rapid rate that it is difficult to “keep score,” to measure just how much change is occurring—much less to divine the innumerable implications. Nonetheless, the dimensions of change that we discern and the impacts that we foresee arising therefrom have led to our apprehension concerning the future of the academic profession and, perforce, the academy itself. This constitutes the enormous stakes. Nothing less. Within this volatile environment, we have discerned that the direction in which American higher education appears to be heading is being driven, most generally, by twin challenges: (1) to continue to expand access while (2) containing or reducing operating costs, in order to achieve economic efficiencies. Three salient developments reflect efforts to realize these overarching goals: first, the rise of a significant and increasingly competitive for-profit sector, of both the “brick” and “click” variety (Adelman, 2000); second, the further bifurcation of public higher education systems (as well as the independent sector) into elite, more traditional institutions and mass or convenience producers; and, third, the increasing privatization of the public sector. In addition to trends of escalating interinstitutional competition and a focus on cost containment, the most problematic change—with potentially enormous long-term consequences —is the differentiation and restructuring of academic staffing (work roles, types of appointments, and careers) designed to support the “new” educational production function. Although the precise complexion of the “new equilibrium” remains unclear, as does its exact timing and trajectory, what is clear is that we can expect over the coming decade and beyond a period of tension and realignment as the new higher education order takes root and familiar staffing policies lurch toward adjustment. Movement toward this new equilibrium will require throughout higher education—at individual academic units and campuses, in entire systems , and among external stakeholders—responding to two congeries of challenges : to create appropriate policy and to design relevant research to probe what is transpiring and assess the results. POLICY CHALLENGES The broad contours of the period of adjustment will present a number of tricky policy challenges to the nation and to our colleges and universities. We have identified at least five sorts of policy challenges that we anticipate will, in the aggregate, redefine the character of the academic profession—encompassing the faculty’s expectations, obligations, opportunities, and constraints. First are nationwide challenges pertaining to recruitment to academic careers , especially in the sciences and the humanities, and subsuming the crucial goal of expanding faculty diversity throughout the academy. Second are challenges to graduate education to better prepare prospective candidates for the new academic workforce. A third set of challenges centers on staffing arrangements: how to manage adroitly the transition to a more sharply polarized system (elite versus openaccess institutions; this will require recalibration of the access-excellence calculus ) and how to define and institute optimum policies for the new staffing arrangements. Fourth are campus and system challenges to renegotiate the basic social contract between faculty and their institutional employers. These tasks will entail, in part, managing the inexorable movement toward a more stratified distribution among faculty ranks into what may become a de facto “star and chorus” system. A fifth major challenge will revolve around getting quality assurance right in the new era, namely, tailoring processes to preserve effective voluntary regional accreditation—and an influential role for faculty—in the face of accelerating governmental and market-driven pressures. A G E N D A S F O R P O L I C Y A N A L Y S I S , R E S E A R C H , A N D A C T I O N 347 Recruitment to Academic Careers The challenges posed to recruitment are several. First, how is the nation to recruit the “best and brightest” to what will become for the most part, from the systems perspective, much more of a...