Since the early 1990s, there has been a proliferation of memoirs by tenured humanities professors. Although the memoir form has been discussed within the flourishing field of life writing, academic memoirs have received little critical scrutiny. Based on close readings of memoirs by such academics as Michael Bérubé, Cathy N. Davidson, Jane Gallop, bell hooks, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, Jane Tompkins, and Marianna Torgovnick, Academic Lives considers why so many professors write memoirs and what cultural capital they carry. Cynthia G. Franklin finds that academic memoirs provide unparalleled ways to unmask the workings of the academy at a time when it is dealing with a range of crises, including attacks on intellectual freedom, discontentment with the academic star system, and budget cuts. Franklin considers how academic memoirs have engaged with a core of defining concerns in the humanities: identity politics and the development of whiteness studies in the 1990s; the impact of postcolonial studies; feminism and concurrent anxieties about pedagogy; and disability studies and the struggle to bring together discourses on the humanities and human rights. The turn back toward humanism that Franklin finds in some academic memoirs is surreptitious or frankly nostalgic; others, however, posit a wide-ranging humanism that seeks to create space for advocacy in the academic and other institutions in which we are all unequally located. These memoirs are harbingers for the critical turn to explore interrelations among humanism, the humanities, and human rights struggles.

This book brings together reflections from seventy academics – everyone from doctoral students to a retired provost – who share their lived experiences in graduate school and beyond. Career seekers, adjunct professors, those in or considering graduate school, and tenure-track professors alike will find truths revealed through these shared experiences of struggle, triumph, loss and hope.

This invaluable compendium offers guidance, support and advice for those contemplating or involved in academic careers. The contributors provide rich, personal and often humerous accounts of shared and unique experiences in the world of academia.

Academic life is complex and adjusting to life as a new academic requires a range of skills and abilities to fulfil the multiple roles the academic must play as researcher, teacher and administrator.

While a life in academia is still one bestowed with enormous privilege and opportunity, on the inside, its cracks and fragility have been on display for some time. We see evidence of this in researchers bemoaning time spent applying for grants rather than doing research; teachers frustrated at the ways student feedback data are deployed to feed judgements about them; and doctoral students realising that they have little chance of securing full-time academic work. Yet in the public policy domain, the opposite appears true: academics left to their own devices in their elite ivory towers, rarely ever do enough. This collection addresses the fact that academic life deserves to be rigorously researched. Its emphasis on the measured university traces how academic life had ceded itself to the logics of perverse measures, and raises questions about whether the contemporary university may well have become too measured to adequately counter the political times now upon us. The contributors explore the ways in which measurement inhabits paradoxical positions in these spaces. It sketches the contours and consequences of mismeasurement, including the personal costs to academic staff. It examines our desires and fumbled efforts at institutional transformation, and it puts on display our own ethical conduct. The collection concludes with a call to chart a course for a revitalized moral economy of academic labour. This book was originally published as a special issue of Higher Education Research & Development.

The book draws on the 2007 Changing Academic Profession international survey in order to document the personal characteristics, career trajectories, sense of identity/commitment and job satisfaction of academics in 14 countries with different levels of economic and social development and different higher education systems. With nearly 26,000 academics surveyed in 19 countries (of which 14 are reporting their results in this volume), the empirical basis of the book is the most up-to-date and far-reaching in the area. With major changes taking place both in the local and global contexts of higher education and in the working conditions within individual universities, as exemplified by increasing managerialism and performance-based funding, it is important to consider the impact of these changes on the profiles and working lives of the academic profession across different countries. But it is also important to look at the ways in which the faculty’s changing profile impacts on the organisation and management of universities and on the delivery of their central functions. Although not always obvious in the short-term, academic work and its conditions attract, incorporate and promote different types of individuals who, in turn, exert considerable influence on the nature of academic work, higher education institutions and, potentially, society. As faculty members are central to the teaching, research and service enterprise activities of higher education, it is important to understand their personal characteristics, career trajectories, sense of identity and commitment, and job satisfaction. These are central for understanding the academic profession in general and, in particular, the factors affecting their involvement and productivity in the work of their institutions. These are a complex result of a mixture of contextual factors (e.g. the status and regulatory framework of the higher education system, the features and atmosphere of the particular institution) and personal factors (e.g. gender, educational attainment, family background, attitudes to work and broader social values).This book examines the different situations facing the academic profession in individual countries and provides comparative studies of country differences.

Bringing together an international line-up of contributors, this collection provides a transnational examination of recent developments within the academic profession in the light of changes to higher education systems, globalization and marketization.