Understanding American Academics: What Have We Learned and Where Do We Go From Here? Occasional Papers Series No. 6 (original) (raw)
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Center For Studies in Higher Education, 2007
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.
The Impact of the Academic Revolution on Faculty Careers
1973
In this report a three-strand model for faculty careers is developed. These strands are the disciplinary, the institutional, and the external career of faculty. An attempt is made to determine the outcome of the "academic revolution" spoken of by Jencks and Reisman in their landmark study of that title. Some of the topics covered include faculty power, influence, and prestige, recruitment and promotion, academic markets, and initial socialization of faculty toward their discipline and their teaching role. The report evaluates the diverse studies on faculty careers and synthesizes them into a general framework. Rather than review the literature, however, it selects the most valuable information from all the research to provide as complete an analysis as possible of faculty careers.
The American Professoriate: A Status Check of Factors and Perceptions
World Journal of Education, 2012
Since the publication of Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Boyer, 1990) many changes have taken place in higher education in America. However, how have faculty perceptions of aspects of the professoriate such as teaching, research, publishing, administration, quality, and areas of interest, changed in the twenty-plus years since the initial research on this topic. This project provides an overview and insight in the current concerns of faculty with respect to promotion and tenure issues. The findings suggest a number of changes have taken place in the way scholarship is perceived by faculty. Publishing still maintains a significant role in decision-making about tenure and promotion and there is still a significant difference in the perception of factors in achieving tenure and promotion between research institutions and liberal arts institutions. There are differences between tenured and non-tenured faculty in concerning what constitutes appropriate scholarship. The scholarship of teaching is seen as important by faculty and yet most have indicated they have little formal teacher training. In both research and liberal arts institutions research and grant writing are seen as important, but there is also a concern that these activities detract from the primary role as a teacher.
Faculty Identity and the ‘Lesser Role’: Service to the Academy
2011
This study describes early career socialization to the service role in a College of Education at a university in the Southwest. This choice highlights perceptions of institutional influence on service experiences and development of a service ethos. Participants include seven early career women faculty in education, most hired during a two-year period. Multiple in-depth interviews were conducted with these participants throughout pre-tenure, resulting in a total of 26 interviews. We identified a common process of service identity development: orienting to the service role, induction into the service culture, and development of service identity. The resulting service identities are characterized as servant, politician, veteran, and castaway. Findings are discussed in terms of faculty rewards, professional identity transformation, and institutional change. Academic service is the least understood of faculty roles and responsibilities. Relative to teaching and research, it is considered ambiguous and insignificant (McCabe & McCabe, 2000; Tierney & Bensimon, 1996). The perceived irrelevance of service is exacerbated by institutional reward systems that often ignore service contributions, particularly for promotion and tenure decisions (Boice, 2000). Theoretically, the-complete faculty member,‖ Fairweather (2002) said, is expected to-be productive in all aspects of faculty work‖ (p. 29). In Journal of the Professoriate (5)1 122 reality, the service role is rarely included in discussions of faculty productivity or success, except as a foil to teaching and research.
The Demise of 'Faculty' Meanings in U.S. Hoods and a Manifesto for Change
While the number of academic specialties has grown tremendously since the 1950s, the variety of colors assigned to academic disciplines has remained unchanged in more than a half-century. The result is that few fields of study are properly represented by American faculty colors. A realignment of faculty colors would help return some sense to the standard, along with a few new colors.