On the Brink: Assessing the Status of the American Faculty. Research & Occasional Paper Series: CSHE.3.07 (original) (raw)

2007, Center For Studies in Higher Education

This paper focuses on the present condition and future of the professoriate and is part of a long-term study on how the academic profession is changing, now more rapidly than at any time in memory. These dramatic shifts have led to a deep restructuring of academic appointments, work, and careers. The question now looming is whether the forces that have triggered academic restructuring will, in time, so transform the academic profession that its role-its unique contribution-is becoming ever more vulnerable to dangerous compromise. Whether the academic profession is able to negotiate successfully its role in the new era-to preserve core values and to ensure the indispensable contributions of the academy to society-remains to be seen. Whither the professoriate? As the academy spins into the new century, it enters also a new era, one in which the future of the American faculty is as unclear as at any time in the past. As we document in our recently published study, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, substantial transformation of the American academic profession has occurred in recent decades, since the brief interlude of "unrest" subsided circa 1970. 1 In its closing chapters, we interpret our empiricallybased findings and speculate about what lies ahead for the (thus far) indomitable, if somewhat rattled, academic profession.

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