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.

As the nature of education generally, and higher education in particular, changes irrevocably, it is crucial to understand the informed opinions of those closest to the institutions of learning. This book, based on a survey of academics in 19 nations and conducted by leading global scholars, is a thorough sounding of the attitudes of academics to their working environment. As the post-WWII liberal consensus crumbles, higher education is increasingly viewed as a private and personal investment in individual social mobility rather than as a public good and, ipso facto, a responsibility of public authorities. The incursion of corporate culture into academe, with its ‘stakeholders’, ‘performance pay’ and obsession with ‘competitiveness’ is a matter of bitter debate, with some arguing that short-termism is obviating epoch-making research which by definition requires patience and persistence in the face of the risk of failure. This book highlights these and many other key issues facing the academic profession in the US and around the world at the beginning of the 21st century and examines the issues from the perspective of those who are at the front line of change. This group has numerous concerns, not least in the US, where government priorities are shifting with growing budget pressures to core activities such as basic education, health and welfare. Drawing too on comparable surveys conducted in 1992, the book charts the actual contours of change as reflected in the opinions of academics. Critically, the volume explicitly compares and contrasts the situation of American academics with that of academics in other advanced and developing economies. Such an assessment is critical both for Americans to chart the future of their indigenous tertiary enterprise, but also for shaping the response of the nations around the world who contemplate applying the American model to their own national systems.

"In-depth, insightful, with a masterful handling of the relevant data, The American Faculty provides the most comprehensive overview of the status of the academic profession that is available." -- Jay Chronister, Curry School of Education, University of Virginia