January-February 2007

The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, 600 pages, $45.00 hardcover.

Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year. James M. Lang. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 208 pages, $18.00 paperback; $45.00 hardcover.

What is happening to the academic profession? And what, if anything, does it mean for the education of the next generation of college and university students? These questions are among the most important facing higher education today, but they are devilishly hard to answer. In contrast to those who focus on why (as one critic recently wrote) “colleges are so hard to change,” the two books considered in this review see change as an ongoing and integral feature of the enterprise. Jack Schuster and Martin Finkelstein’s statistical tour de force, The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, maps myriad, often stunning, shifts in the condition of the professoriate since the late 1960s, while James Lang’s memoir Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year offers a lively report on how it looks and feels to shoot the academic rapids today.

Schuster and Finkelstein, longtime collaborators in research on faculty trends, perform valiant service in The American Faculty by bringing together basic demographic data and results from 28 surveys of college faculty conducted over the past 50 years and more. Their “harder” figures stretch (in some cases) from 1939 to 2003, but their main sources for the “softer” attitudinal data are nine general-purpose national faculty surveys conducted between 1969 and 1998 by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the American Council on Education, and the U.S. Department of Education and its National Center for Education Statistics. As the authors note, technical issues that complicate comparisons have deterred researchers from making full use of these resources in the past.

Impressively, Schuster and Finkelstein have devised a way to work with these data, and the two scholars provide an extensive and fascinating set of appendices with descriptions of all the surveys, a concordance of their questions, and guides to gaining access to and using information from them. This has clearly been a labor of love, and the results, although already widely known in outline, are made newly sobering through the thoroughness of the authors’ documentation and analysis.

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