Scholars in the Changing American Academy

This book highlights key issues facing the academic profession in the US and around the world at the beginning of the 21st Century. Academics today primarily work in universities and colleges where they are employees of organizations that are owned by governments or independent legal persons such as boards of trustees or profit-making corporations. All of the stakeholders associated with universities and colleges have their respective perspectives on the goals, roles, and processes of these institutions. This book brings out the distinctive perspective of the academics. Ultimately it is their energy and their gifts upon which the future of the university in a knowledge-based society depends. The period from the end of the Second World War through the mid 1970s has been dubbed the golden age of the modern university, and it was an especially promising era for members of the US academic profession. US higher education was expanding, salaries were rising, employment contracts offered security and reasonable work loads, and university managers and academics shared a mutual respect for professorial autonomy and academic freedom. In the ensuing three decades, especially in the U.S., there have been many changes. Perhaps most fundamental has been the shift in national and state government priorities towards more emphasis on basic education, health, and welfare and away from fiscal support of higher education. A new ideology has emerged stressing the private as contrasted to the public benefits of higher education, and the importance of leaving market forces to shape the future directions of higher education. And especially since the early 1990s this ideology has been transformed into policy and practices that have had a direct impact on the welfare of the U.S. academic profession. This book, drawing extensively on comparable surveys of U.S. academics conducted in 1992 and 2007, seeks to portray the reactions of U.S. academics to these recent policies and practices. Have they elected exit, voice, or loyalty? Where appropriate for developing the argument, U.S. findings are contrasted with international findings, as the above surveys were conducted simultaneously in several Western European and East Asian settings.