The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers

Who We Are

Reviewed by James S. Fairweather

In this brave attempt to make sense of twenty-six years of national surveys of the American professoriate, Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein provide a valuable service to those who love data about professors. The eleven chapters are organized into four parts: Overview of the American Faculty, The Faculty at Work, The Academic Career, and Contemporary Academic Life: An Assessment.

The extensive appendices provide the best summary of national faculty surveys available today. The book has more to commend it than data. Schuster and Finkelstein use a historical perspective to explain demographic trends and make predictions. They remind us that “the very history of higher education can be recounted as a struggle between adherence to traditional academic values and the need to operationalize them in ways responsive to a societal environment always in flux.” They help us understand how innovations such as instructional technology can be understood both as a unique phenomenon in our time and as one of many external pressures that characterize the evolution of the American professoriate. 

AAUP members will appreciate the reminder that tenure, with the protections it provides to academic speech, was not always part of the American academy; it was hard won and is well worth fighting to preserve. Schuster and Finkelstein’s description of an ever-decreasing core of tenure-track faculty deals with issues that are central to the future of the American colleges and universities. 

The most successful combination of historical and quantitative analyses is in chapter 8, which focuses on faculty salaries. The text and data are easy to understand, and the implications for governmental and institutional policy are clear. Chapter 11, on the question of what lies ahead, is also a gem. It ties together the strands of statistics with policy implications. Rather than leave us with a summary of findings, Schuster and Finkelstein try to predict what their findings mean for future academic generations. No one is better positioned to discuss the challenges of conducting research on faculty than these two scholars. 

The book has one minor and two consequential flaws. The minor flaw is that the book is not an easy read. The volume of tables and the use of rhetorical questions make some arguments difficult to follow. The multiple measures of teaching effort, for example, are not always tied into a coherent message. In the section on faculty work, the percentage of time spent on every activity seems to have gone up, which is not possible. Time spent on administration declined, but the number of administrative tasks carried out by faculty members went up. It would be better to have less data and a clearer conceptual model of faculty work. 

For readers using the book as a data source and reference, the two consequential flaws are not deal breakers, but they may lead readers interested in the analysis and interpretation of trends and potential strategies for reform to doubt some of Schuster and Finkelstein’s key conclusions and predictions. The first is fundamental and intellectual: an implicit linking of external forces with changes in individual and collective faculty behavior. It is as if the institutions and their departments have no role in the process of change. Schuster and Finkelstein say little about how institutions respond to and help shape the shifting external world. Yet institutional responses to external changes will affect four of the five policy concerns raised in chapter 11: the recruitment of new faculty, the improvement of graduate education, staffing arrangements, and the basic social contract between the faculty and their institutions. Shifting national student demographics, increased cost, and information technology provide levers for major changes in faculty work, but how or even whether these changes take place is a function of institutional (and departmental) responses to them. It is not enough to declare the shrinking core of tenure-track faculty to be indicative of the future. This employment pattern reflects a conscious choice by academic leaders to shape the professoriate in a more market-responsive (and cheaper) way. Should enough institutions decide that increasing the proportion of full-time tenure-track faculty improves their competitive position, we may see a shift away from this trend. 

The second consequential flaw is in the handling and interpretation of data on trends in faculty work. Schuster and Finkelstein often venture into claims of causation, and they say that they to “control for” multiple factors when they do not control for them in any meaningful statistical way. In order to be convincing, some of their conclusions would require complex multivariate models instead of the simple cross-tabulations presented in the book. Schuster and Finkelstein never clarify the statistical procedures used to determine trends. In the appendices, they urge caution when interpreting the significance of small mean differences, but elsewhere they declare a mean difference of 0.2 percentage points to be a trend. Their practice of combining data from two- and four-year institutions to make single national estimates muddies interpretation. A claimed shift in faculty work over time toward teaching may be a function of an increase in the proportion of predominantly teaching-oriented community college instructors in the national population of faculty over time rather than a shift in individual faculty work. A shoddy example is table 4-5A, where Schuster and Finkelstein focus on what they claim is an increase in the ratio of time spent on teaching over research. Yet the total population numbers, which do not sum to the estimates presented separately for men and women, show the opposite trend. The authors must correctly describe these numbers for readers to believe that a radical transformation of the work of the professoriate is under way. For example, they state that “gender, too, proves to be an influential variable” in differentiating faculty work allocation—implying cause and effect without explaining the relationship between gender and faculty work allocation. 

Despite these flaws, overall I found this book to be a significant resource for data on the American professoriate. I found it a joy to go to a single source for the history and details of the major national surveys of the professoriate. For that reason, I and many of my colleagues will benefit from this book for years to come.

James S. Fairweather is professor of Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Education at Michigan State University. His e-mail address is fairwea4@msu.edu.

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