The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers

Preface

Preface The Project on the Future of the American Faculty and the long-standing collaboration of the authors of this volume can trace their origins back two decades. As Howard Bowen and Jack Schuster were designing the campus-visit component of the multifaceted study that ultimately yielded American Professors (Oxford University Press, 1986), it became apparent that it would be beneficial— necessary, actually—to invite several experts to help them conduct site visits to some of the thirty-eight campuses they had identified for the purpose of gathering data and interviewing key faculty and administrative leaders. At that time, they learned of an impressive manuscript by Martin Finkelstein based on his dissertation at State University of New York at Buffalo; the manuscript was later published as The American Academic Profession (Ohio State University Press, 1984). They met with Marty in Washington, D.C., and he agreed to conduct five of the site visits. And so, the initial collaboration between Finkelstein and Schuster began. In 1994 the two of them proposed to several foundations, and to TIAACREF , to undertake a substantial study of the contemporary American faculty that would, in effect, bring forward their respective research agendas. The Johns Hopkins University Press agreed to publish the manuscript. But a funny thing happened on the way to the publisher. As parts of the manuscript were being researched, Finkelstein and Schuster, now joined by Robert K. Seal, became persuaded that one aspect of the new study—the striking contrast they had discerned between newer academics and their more senior colleagues—could not be addressed adequately within the confines of a single chapter of the projected manuscript. And so in 1997 they approached their publisher proposing that the embryonic chapter on this distinctively different faculty cohort be expanded into a book-length manuscript. Jacqueline Wehmueller, editor at the Johns Hopkins Press, saw merit in this substitute proposal, and, accordingly, the original, more comprehensive project was put on hold while the authors refocused on this as- pect of academic life. Meanwhile, the three coauthors had been commissioned by the National Center for Education Statistics of the U.S. Department of Education to prepare a monograph on particular facets of this new academic generation . Both manuscripts were published in 1998, the first as The New Academic Generation (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the second as New Entrants to the Full-Time Faculty of Higher Education Institutions (NCES). Once those volumes were completed, our attention returned to the earlier, more ambitious task. The project began to crystallize into two essentially complementary dimensions, reflected in the present volume. In the first, we undertook a retrospective reanalysis and reinterpretation of trends in academic life that span the past several decades; this entailed cutting across the most prominent major national faculty surveys, starting with the landmark 1969 Carnegie Commission survey and continuing through the most recent surveys. We characterize the developments depicted by those successive surveys as nothing less than a restructuring of faculty work and careers. The second overarching task involved squinting into an opaque future as we set off on our more speculative excursion into where the trends that we describe are propelling higher education and, at its core, the academic profession. This exercise has led us to a tangle of prospects both exhilarating and unsettling. We argue in these pages that revolutionary changes are occurring. We are aware that such a term might seem, to some, hyperbolic, but we think the case can readily be made that the transformations—the restructuring—now afoot amount to a many-faceted revolution in academic life. Deciding what constitutes a revolution is decidedly arbitrary, but both of us, having taught doctoral seminars on the history of higher education, have arrived at our own conclusions about precedents meriting that bold label. In the United States, one revolution surely began in the 1820s; that is when academic specialization began to take a firm grip on the academy, when the first academic departments emerged, when the tilt in the direction of professional careerists who displaced tutorial generalists became clear. The academic career was never the same thereafter. All of this evolved slowly, to be sure, and so perhaps revolution is a misleading label . But what emerged was indisputably a transformation: an institution and practitioners markedly different from prevailing practices that had gone before. A second revolution, we submit, took shape in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was fueled by the adaptation on these shores of a research...