The American Academic Profession

The academic profession, like many others, is rapidly being transformed. This book explores the current challenges to the profession and their broad implications for American higher education. Examining what professors do and how academia is changing, contributors to this volume assess current and potential threats to the profession. Leading scholars in sociology and higher education explore such topics as structural and cognitive change, socialization and deviance, career development, and professional autonomy and regulation. A comprehensive analysis of the significant questions facing this crucial profession, The American Academic Profession will be welcomed by students and scholars as well as by administrators and policy makers concerned with the future of the academy.

"This book covers well the issues and problems of the U.S. academic profession in the second half of the twentieth century." -- Contemporary Science The tale of the American academic profession-that large company of men and women, unprecedented in its size and diversity-needs to be written. A large historical literature on America's colleges and universities exists, but much of it is unashamedly hagiographic. On the other hand, more critical works see American universities as being in dire need of massive reform. This charge is not sustained by the contributors to The American Academic Profession, who hope to shatter the code of silence that passes for discretion, by focusing on the forces that have conspired to create the American academic profession. Graubard includes contributions from important scholars around the world: "How the Academic Profession is Changing" by Arthur Levine; "Small Worlds, Different Worlds: The Uniqueness and Troubles of American Academic Professions" by Burton R. Clark; "The Elusive Academic Profession: Complexity and Change" by Francis Oakley; "Uncertainties in the Changing Academic Profession" by Walter E. Massey; "Stewards of Opportunity: America's Public Community Colleges" by Patrick M. Callan; "Public Universities as Academic Workplaces" by Patricia J. Gumport; "Survival of the Fittest? Postgraduate Education and the Professoriate at the Fin de Sicle" by R. M. Douglas; "Reflections on the Culture Wars" by Eugene Goodheart; "A Blow Is Like an Instrument" by Charles Bernstein; "The Science Wars and the Future of the American Academic Profession" by Jay A. Labinger; "The Scientist as Academic" by Cheryl B. Leggon; "The 'Place' of Knowledge in the American Academic Profession" by Sheldon Rothblatt; "Border Crossings: Organizational Boundaries and Challenges to the American Professoriate" by Theodore R. Mitchell; "The Development of Information Technology in American Higher Education" by Martin Trow; and "An International Academic Crisis? The American Professoriate in Comparative Perspective" by Philip G. Altbach. The American Academic Profession is not sanguine about what is currently happening in higher education, or what it imagines the future portends. It simply asks the question: Can a society truly understand its universities and colleges when it has moved too quickly from uncritical admiration to uniformed and ungenerous complaint? This volume intends to dispel some long-persistent myths in favor of objective truth. It is a must for anyone interested in academic problems, for those who work in higher education, and for everyone interested in American ideas, traditions, and social and intellectual history. Stephen R. Graubard is editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal, Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University.

"This book covers well the issues and problems of the U.S. academic profession in the second half of the twentieth century." -- Contemporary Science The tale of the American academic profession-that large company of men and women, unprecedented in its size and diversity-needs to be written. A large historical literature on America's colleges and universities exists, but much of it is unashamedly hagiographic. On the other hand, more critical works see American universities as being in dire need of massive reform. This charge is not sustained by the contributors to The American Academic Profession, who hope to shatter the code of silence that passes for discretion, by focusing on the forces that have conspired to create the American academic profession.Graubard includes contributions from important scholars around the world: "How the Academic Profession is Changing" by Arthur Levine; "Small Worlds, Different Worlds: The Uniqueness and Troubles of American Academic Professions" by Burton R. Clark; "The Elusive Academic Profession: Complexity and Change" by Francis Oakley; "Uncertainties in the Changing Academic Profession" by Walter E. Massey; "Stewards of Opportunity: America's Public Community Colleges" by Patrick M. Callan; "Public Universities as Academic Workplaces" by Patricia J. Gumport; "Survival of the Fittest? Postgraduate Education and the Professoriate at the Fin de Sibcle" by R. M. Douglas; "Reflections on the Culture Wars" by Eugene Goodheart; "A Blow Is Like an Instrument" by Charles Bernstein; "The Science Wars and the Future of the American Academic Profession" by Jay A. Labinger; "The Scientist as Academic" by Cheryl B. Leggon; "The 'Place' of Knowledge in the American Academic Profession" by Sheldon Rothblatt; "Border Crossings: Organizational Boundaries and Challenges to the American Professoriate" by Theodore R. Mitchell; "The Development of Information Technology in American Higher Education" by Martin Trow; and "An International Academic Crisis? The American Professoriate in Comparative Perspective" by Philip G. Altbach.The American Academic Profession is not sanguine about what is currently happening in higher education, or what it imagines the future portends. It simply asks the question: Can a society truly understand its universities and colleges when it has moved too quickly from uncritical admiration to uniformed and ungenerous complaint? This volume intends to dispel some long-persistent myths in favor of objective truth. It is a must for anyone interested in academic problems, for those who work in higher education, and for everyone interested in American ideas, traditions, and social and intellectual history.Stephen R. Graubard is editor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and its journal, Daedalus, and professor of history emeritus at Brown University.

Higher education is becoming destabilized in the face of extraordinarily rapid change. The composition of the academy's most valuable asset—the faculty—and the essential nature of faculty work are being transformed. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein describe the transformation of the American faculty in the most extensive and ambitious analysis of the American academic profession undertaken in a generation. A century ago the American research university emerged as a new organizational form animated by the professionalized, discipline-based scholar. The research university model persisted through two world wars and greatly varying economic conditions. In recent years, however, a new order has surfaced, organized around a globalized, knowledge-based economy, powerful privatization and market forces, and stunning new information technologies. These developments have transformed the higher education enterprise in ways barely imaginable in generations past. At the heart of that transformation, but largely invisible, has been a restructuring of academic appointments, academic work, and academic careers—a reconfiguring widely decried but heretofore inadequately described. This volume depicts the scope and depth of the transformation, combing empirical data drawn from three decades of national higher education surveys. The authors' portrait, at once startling and disturbing, provides the context for interpreting these developments as part of a larger structural evolution of the national higher education system. They outline the stakes for the nation and the challenging work to be done.

This is the first book to critically analyze the future of higher education systems in the four BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - and the USA, analyzing academic salaries, contracts and working conditions and how national policy will affect the academic profession in each context.