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The Review of Higher Education Winter 1981, Volume 4, No. 2 Pages 59 to 66 Copyright© 1981 Association for the Study of Higher Education All Rights Reserved THE FACULTY CLUB: Entrance Closed An Essay Review John R. Thelin* Neil J. Smelser & Robin Content, The Changing Academic Market: General Trends and a Berkeley Case Study (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) xiii and 198 pages. The Search Drama As an undergraduate, I recall a professor who chided his own departmental colleagues by defining a sociologist as “someone who needs a $500 grant to find a brothel.” Today, inflation and gender consciousness render the anecdote inappropriate. Perhaps an up-dated version is that sociologists require $4,000, ten months, and numerous meetings to find finalists for three vacant faculty positions. This is at least one message conveyed by Neil J. Smelser and Robin Content in The Changing Academic Market: General Trends and a Berkeley Case Study. Reports on academic search committees are an unlikely source of drama, yet Smelser and Content draw from their experiences in the sociology depart­ ment at the University of California, Berkeley to touch frayed, sensitive nerves in higher education. Starting with a general analysis of the academic market *Assistant Director, Association o f Independent California Colleges and Universities 59 60 The Review of Higher Education in its historical and social complexity, the work circles gradually before descending into specific areas, viz., historical background on the Berkeley sociology department and, finally, an immersion into the story of the 1975-76 search to fill three vacancies. The authors conclude by inducting to implications which the Berkeley experience holds for the academic profession in the 1980s. The Academic Market Place: Inherent Problems Without Solutions According to Smelser and Content, the academic market is subject to a “cobweb effect,” i.e., the market is imbalanced and inflexible over time and at any given time due to the long gestation period of doctoral programs, the specificities o f faculty job descreptions, and dependency on colleges and universities as the major source of employment. The market analysis is intriguing because of its shift from economics to anthropology, with attention to the importance of ritual and prestige— not salaries— as factors in academic currency. Mentors, pecking orders, patterns of graduate school attendance and a host of other “third factors” provide both buyers and sellers with extraordinary baggage beyond the economics of the market place. Background discussion brings about resurrection of a classic work, Theodore Caplow and Reese McGee’s The Academic Market Place (1958), which in turn provides a healthy reminder that the recent crisis of over-supply is neither new nor unique as a “problem” in the academic market. Caplow and McGee, writing at the time of a brisk market, show that even boom periods have formidable shares of horror stories about abuses in faculty hiring. So, although today we are preoccupied with unemployment, it is worth remembering that the American academic profession is heir to dubious practices, rewards, and punishments quite apart from the circumstances of the day. The dominant characteristic of academic hiring decisions in the 1950s and 1960s is described as “networks of influence”— which leads the authors to examine whether— and how— this may have changed in the past decade. Affirmative action guidelines, government regulations, student participation, published position announcements, coordination with central campus admin­ istration, and access to information from professional associations are now familiar additions to the rules and tactics of the faculty search game. And, in the case of the Berkeley sociology department, computers and systematic procedures for handling inquiries, evaluations, and replies receive special note. The combined measures do not necessarily “reform” the academic searches in any coherent manner, as some new practices may act as countervalences against The Faculty Club: Entrance Closed An Essay Review-Thelin 61 others. Although speed, order, and accuracy are reforms intended as courtesies to anxious applicants, these coexist with the “inefficiencies” of fair, thorough consideration. In sum, widespread publicity and compliance with government guidelines promotes an increase in the number and diversity of applicants, followed in turn by more demand for departmental time and resources in correspondence, analysis, and record-keeping. Another complicating factor is that in the depressed academic...

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