The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers

3. The Professoriate in Profile

C H A P T E R T H R E E The Professoriate in Profile The face of America’s corps of college and university teachers has changed continually and dynamically over the centuries, reflecting the ever-evolving and expanding purposes of the nation’s higher education system. During the past three decades, this expansion in terms of size and complexity has occurred at a decidedly accelerated rate. Toward the outset of our time frame, the American higher education system had already grown so robustly and along so many dimensions that, as Martin Trow (1973) famously suggested, the changes in quantity really amounted to changes in kind. Trow observed that this enormous expansion was tantamount to moving from mass access to the higher education system, already extraordinary by world standards, to essentially universal access . And in the three decades since Trow initially described the explosive movement toward universal access, American higher education has continued to expand and has diversified even more dramatically. Expansion and diversi- fication, then, are the central motifs of this evolving profile of the American faculty during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Familiar themes, to be sure. But the details are often illuminating and sometimes surprising. And the implications for a strikingly different American academy in the proximate future are inescapable. ACCELERATING GROWTH AND DIFFUSION The systemic growth of higher education in the United States has been a function of numerous interconnected factors. Among them are the lifting of immigration restrictions since 1965, which provided an infusion of some 40 mil- lion immigrants during the last third of the twentieth century; the rebound in secondary school graduates after a prolonged dip in their numbers between 1970 and 2000 (reaching some 2.8 million in 2000); the sharply rising proportion of these graduates continuing into postsecondary education, from 53.3% in 1969 to 63.3% in 2000 (especially the much larger numbers of collegebound women and nonwhites); the greater numbers of “nontraditional-age” students , that is, adults entering initially or returning to postsecondary institutions (again, especially women); and the substantially larger numbers attending colleges and universities on a part-time, nonresidential basis. Responding to the relentlessly escalating demand for education beyond the secondary level, the existing institutions of higher education have on average grown larger— sometimes much larger—and often much more complex. In addition the number of such institutions increased to 4,168 in 2003 from 2,525 in 1969, a 65.1% increase compared to a 47.8% increase over the previous thirty-year period (NCES, 2002). Concomitantly, a sizzling variety of new kinds of institutions have sprung forth to claim “market share,” some designed expressly to meet the needs of the new student demographics: to educate women, nonnative speakers , and racial and ethnic minorities. These basic measures of expansion and variety, of institutions and students, tell much of the story—more fundamentally than any other data—of higher education’s transformation and, for our purposes , of the environment in which the American faculty practice their profession (table 3.1). Although it is commonplace to think of the 1950s and 1960s as the era of spectacular growth in higher education—and indeed that growth was stunning —the post-1960s decades have witnessed substantial if somewhat less dramatic expansion. Observers were quick to herald, and lament, a reversal of fortune in the early 1970s as public financing of higher education abruptly slowed (see, for example, Cheit’s 1971 The New Depression in Higher Education). Clark Kerr observed, however, that, depression or no, the 1970s came to be the decade that ranked second in terms of overall growth in higher education (Kerr, 1991). Indeed, the vast expansion of higher education constitutes the basic framework within which the metamorphosis of the American academic profession has taken place, as academic staffing patterns have responded to the demands upon, and opportunities opened to, the academy. Meanwhile, a still greater force affecting the deployment of faculty has risen: the mushrooming use of information technology that is fueling a delocalization of instruction and scholarship (see part 4), that is, a far-reaching rearrangement of the faculty’s core activities. By this we mean that (among other developments) the ready availability of a host of technologies has speedily decoupled the age38 O V E R V I E W O F T H E A M E R I C A N F A C U L T Y [3.138.174.174] Project MUSE...