In an academy squeezed hard by formidable pressures, what is the
future of the faculty?
Over the past 70 years, the American university has become the global
gold standard of excellence in research and graduate education. The
unprecedented surge of federal research support of the postWorld War II
American university paralleled the steady strengthening of the American
academic profession itself, which managed to attract the best and
brightest educators from around the world while expanding the influence
of the "faculty factor" throughout the academic realm. But in the past
two decades, escalating costs and intensifying demands for efficiency
have resulted in a wholesale reshaping of the academic workforce, one
marked by skyrocketing numbers of contingent faculty members.
Extending Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein's richly detailed
classic The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and
Careers, this important book documents the transformation of the
American faculty--historically the leading global source of Nobel
laureates and innovation--into a diversified and internally stratified
professional workforce. Drawing on heretofore unpublished data, the book
provides the most comprehensive contemporary depiction of the changing
nature of academic work and what it means to be a college or university
faculty member in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The
rare higher education study to incorporate multinational perspectives by
comparing the status and prospects of American faculty to teachers in
the major developing economies of Europe and East Asia, The Faculty
Factor also explores the redistribution of academic work and the
ever-more diverse pathways for entering into, maneuvering through, and
exiting from academic careers.
Using the tools of sociology, anthropology, and demography, the book
charts the impact of waves of technological change, mass globalization,
and the severe financial constraints of the last decade to show the
impact on the lives and careers of those who teach in higher education.
The authors propose strategic policy recommendations to extend the
strengths of American higher education to retain leadership in the
global economy. Written for professors, adjuncts, graduate students, and
academic, political, business, and not-for-profit leaders, this
data-rich study offers a balanced assessment of the risks and
opportunities posed for the American faculty by economic, market-driven
forces beyond their control.
