- The Changing Landscape of the Academic Profession: Faculty Culture at For-Profit Colleges and Universities
The Changing Landscape of the Academic Profession by Vicente M. Lechuga is a compilation of four case studies of faculty culture through an analysis of the reported experiences of 52 faculty members at four for-profit, accredited higher education institutions. To his credit, Lechuga chooses to address both similarities and differences among faculty by studying four very different manifestations of the for-profit sector: a large national multi-campus university offering associate-through-master degrees; a large regional multi-campus college offering certificate, associate, and some bachelor degrees; a graduate-based on-line distance education university; and a single campus institution offering mainly associate degrees.
Lechuga makes a valuable contribution to the field by tackling a research area that is clearly underdeveloped. He contributes qualitative data on a topic for which dated assumptions and biases about for-profit education and what it looks like too often drive perceptions. Moreover, Lechuga paints a portrait of a faculty career context that could perhaps be considered a forecast for the working conditions of a larger proportion of faculty in the near future. In fact, in Chapter 1, Lechuga draws attention to the fact that traditional images of a full-time tenure track professoriate participating in institutional governance and protected by academic freedom do not reflect reality for about half of all faculty members.
The book briefly, but solidly, summarizes relevant literature, including a synthesis of appropriate organizational theory with commentary on the recent transformation of the faculty workforce noted above. Despite the puzzling brevity of his interview protocol and an over-simplified conceptual framework that defines cultural analysis of faculty as the exploration of their "attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs." Lechuga engages in an impressive exploration of faculty culture that moves beyond the notion of shared beliefs. He analyzes faculty reports of behavior and the organizational forces that appear to influence their actions and their interpretation of those actions.
This unique lens provides a compelling portrayal of an emerging new faculty identity and serves as a basis for understanding the role such faculty play in legitimating the purpose and function of for-profit education—market-based teaching and learning. The book presents a set of work environments in which faculty negotiate a sometimes conflicting set of hybrid organizational norms—those originating from academia and those of the business sector.
Lechuga's elaboration of the administrative burden carried by the few full-time faculty who are situated within institutions routinely managing high turnover among instructors and dominated by part-time faculty mirrors similar challenges in public community colleges. At these for-profit institutions, the highly standardized educational commodity is delivered by practitioner faculty—independent contractors whose main professional identity is located within their accumulated professional experiences outside their faculty role.
In two of Lechuga's case institutions, full-time faculty are essentially administrators who also teach, but whose main responsibility is to hire instructors and maintain the operation and quality of their respective programs. Lechuga does a wonderful job of examining the tensions that arise when faculty desires for autonomy, academic freedom, and shared governance conflict with the corporate norms of efficiency, standardization, [End Page 202] quality control, and market-driven, top-down decision-making. In the other two smaller institutions, full-time faculty are more numerous, but they struggle in the face of job instability. Through his description of multiple institutional contexts, Lechuga demonstrates how increased governance can have both positive and negative consequences for faculty work-life and curriculum quality and consistency.
Lechuga's objective stance allows the reader to wonder about the potential merits of one central aspect of the for-profit approach. His explication of the differences between the traditional components of the academic profession—teaching, research, and service—and the components of work life for for-profit faculty—teaching, learning, and service—reveals a striking difference between what we understand to be the priorities of a research...