Inside Higher Ed: The evolving (eroding?) faculty job
A week ago, new data on faculty salaries showed that professors’ pay fell behind inflation for the second year in a row. A month ago, when a federal commission studying higher education released a paper on reasons that college costs so much, it identified professors — their power and tenure — as a prime culprit.Feeling underappreciated and under siege? Does your job feel unstable?
There’s a reason, according to two of the leading scholars of the professoriate. They have just finished what experts are calling a landmark study of the professoriate, which argues that we are experiencing “a revolution” in academic life that will be equal in its lasting significance to such events as the importation of the research university model to the United States in the late 19th century or the “massification” of higher education after World War II.
“Seismic shifts are profoundly changing how knowledge is acquired and transmitted,” and while it is unclear where these changes will lead the academy, it is certain that faculty jobs are changing — and changing in a big way. That is the central thesis of The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, by Jack H. Schuster and Martin Finkelstein, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
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