American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled by Howard R. Bowen and Jack H. Schuster (review)

Book Reviews89 HOWARD R. BOWEN and JACK H. SCHUSTER. American Professors: A National Resource Imperiled. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 316 p. This examination of the nature and future of the American professoriate collects a wealth of information abstracted from nearly 400 publications supplemented by the authors' surveys and interviews. Despite the ninety or so tables and charts the authors employ, the information is ambiguous enough to support premises varying according to interpreter. Bowen and Schuster's central point — that American universities have been able to maintain quality through fifteen years of stringent budgets and adverse conditions, but will not be able to continue to do so — requires an extrapolation that trends enabling universities to attract and keep high quality people under such conditions have led to policies and short term solutions which will result in the opposite effect over the next ten years. In general their thesis depends on accepting that the traditional model of the university dedicated to the life of the mind is more appropriate than the emerging model of a university shaped by the educational marketplace because the nature of the present can be documented while the future can only be projected. For instance, discussing faculty attitudes, Bowen and Schuster demonstrate statistically that 82 percent of the faculty were satisfied or very satisfied with their careers in 1980 (48-49). Their counter, that interviews in 1984 "revealed perceptibly weakened morale," has an anecdotal quality, rendering it less convincing to people who do not understand the distinctions between the two models. Similarly, the necessity of time latitude in the profession ("people cannot be forced to think or be creative by controlling their hours of work") is noted but not explored, so that its effectiveness rests on a willingness to accept the life of the mind as the function of the university (72). The nature of the model leads to differing attitudes toward salary differentials, working conditions, workload, tenure, the value placed on education, and the way the model is currently being altered through ad hoc decisions. Looking at salaries, Bowen and Schuster offer statistical evidence that faculty salaries showed a real decrease of 15 percent between 1970 and 1984. They conclude that although there are valid reasons for paying faculty in some disciplines more than those in others, since money has never been the primary reason for entering academia, to make it "the mainspring which powers the academic enterprise" is also to say that "collegiality , the service motif, and the love of teaching and learning are passe and can no longer be relied upon for attraction and retention of faculty or for incentives to hard and effective work among senior faculty" (253). Not only is response to a perceived market reshaping the academic enterprise, but there are reasons to question the validity of the market claims. Bowen and Schuster demonstrate that there are a variety of labor pools in all disciplines (two-thirds of all faculty have worked at least a year outside academe), and they quietly suggest that alternatively, one could require more courses in liberal arts areas and fewer in "high market" disciplines, lowering the need for demand area instructors (254). Unfortunately, such suggestions counter the marketplace model legislators and trustees are more familiar with. American Professors is not reading for an evening, but it is a fruitful source of information for those wishing to understand the place of the teaching profession at the present or for those wishing information about various aspects of the profession . Bowen and Schuster call attention to unintentional effects: universities have scavenged retirement positions where other state agencies promote into those higher salaries, creating a relative loss in university salary pools. Not all points are as thoroughly explored as the issue of salaries, however. In allocating only five pages 90Rocky Mountain Review to a discussion of part-time faculty, they slight the significance of the problem, as well as omit certain dimensions of it. The part-time phenomenon results from the same impulse to exploit resources (including human ones) and to ignore intangible costs which constitutes the authors' main thesis. A more complete discussion could have provided a concrete illustration of the way short-term solutions lead to longterm...