Resize Text: 
As I write this article, I am still a professor of higher education, as I have been for twenty-two years—someone who studies and teaches about what has happened and is happening in higher education. By the time I read this article in print, I will have started my new position as general secretary of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), someone who participates in higher education in ways that affect its future course. As a professor I have always sought to connect my scholarship and teaching to public policy and professional practice. But in my new position, I will be more directly involved than ever before in trying to influence higher education policy and practice. This article reflects the bridging of these worlds.
In what follows I look back at the academic profession in the 20th century, as it was shaped by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, by key higher education associations situated at One Dupont Circle in Washington D.C. (“Dupont Circle” became the collective name for these associations), and by the AAUP. Then I look to the 21st century—not to extrapolate a past trajectory but rather to explore future possibilities that counterbalance some of the unintended effects of earlier developments.
Looking Back
Creating a national, mobile professoriate
Early in the 20th century, the Carnegie Foundation was instrumental in creating the conditions for a mobile professoriate that is national in its orientation. Through reports and other mechanisms such as the establishment of standard measures of high school coursework (the so-called “Carnegie Unit”) and the college credit hour (which was proposed in a Carnegie report by Morris Cooke), the foundation facilitated student movement across state boundaries and among institutions.
At the same time, it undertook initiatives that led to the establishment of a nationally portable retirement system for academics, enabling their movement as well. Nearly 100 years later, through the “Bologna Process,” Europeans are creating structures to encourage student movement across institutional and national boundaries. Yet they have failed to recognize the fundamental importance of ensuring a similar mobility for professors.
That national movement of faculty members has been a central contributor not only to the strength of the U.S. academic profession but also to the creativity and success of the American higher education system. Much comparative higher education scholarship attributes the strength of our system to the relative weakness of federal control over it (through a national ministry) and to the relative strength of campus presidents, making for an environment that fosters organizational innovation and variation (Clark, 1983, 1998).
But that is only part of the story. A key contributor to the dynamism of American higher education’s curricula and to its scholarly and scientific preeminence has been the ability of professors to move among institutions that are competing with one another, sowing new schools of thought and lines of inquiry across the country (e.g., see Ben-David, 1977).
In the context of a rising industrial economy, which required a standardization of interchangeable parts in a national system of production, it made perfect sense for the Carnegie Foundation to establish the Carnegie Unit and credit hour, which provided colleges and universities with a proxy measure to gauge the skills and knowledge freshmen and transfer students were bringing with them. Similarly, it made sense for the foundation to contribute to students’ ability to move across state boundaries by advocating the use of standardized measures of learning, developing an entrance examination (the Graduate Record Exam) that would be broadly recognized, and helping to form the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which itself developed and scored exams such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). Such national entrance exams for undergraduate and graduate schools enabled students to apply to and attend the institutions of higher learning that best fit with their abilities.
But a special genius led the Carnegie Foundation to create a portable retirement plan for faculty (what later became TIAA, then TIAA/CREF), which ensured the mobility of academic labor. Such a system, still unique in the advanced industrialized world, fosters and rewards competition and innovation. Contrast that with other North American and European systems, in which once faculty members have started their academic careers at one institution, they must pay a substantial cost to move to another because they cannot transfer their retirement plans and assets with them.
A national orientation is key to what many scholars of the academic profession see as excellence. Indeed, for scholars such as Jencks and Riesman (1968), who wrote the classic work on the strength of the American academic profession, the orientation of professors to “universalistic” values that are national in scope and that override the “particularistic” and non-meritocratic values of specific locales or groups is fundamental to the quality of the profession and of the higher education system with which it is inextricably intertwined.
Creating a professoriate with security, academic freedom, and responsibility for shared governance
But it is one thing to have the freedom to move from place to place and to explore new ideas—it is another to have the security and academic freedom to do so. And it is yet another to have a key role in institutions’ academic decision-making. In the latter two regards, the AAUP, in concert with Dupont Circle, built on the foundation laid by the Carnegie Foundation to enable the American academic profession and colleges and universities to more fully realize their respective and interconnected potentials.
In the context of a policy discourse that (inaccurately) casts tenure as a job for life, it is worth emphasizing that the establishment of this institution in the U.S. has been essential to facilitating the creativity of American academics and in attracting international academics to our universities. Academic freedom and a stable professional path on which to pursue it have unleashed the inventiveness and ingenuity that have characterized the curricular and scholarly innovations in American higher education. Indeed, in the classic academic freedom case of the McCarthy era, Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957), Chief Justice Earl Warren expressed the view that “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study, and to evaluate, and to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die” (p. 250).
Such conviction about the significance of academic freedom and tenure led the newly formed AAUP to develop a “Declaration of Principles” in 1915. A decade later, at a conference convened by the American Council on Education (ACE, of which the AAUP was a constituent member), a shorter “Conference Statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure” was developed. Fifteen years after that, the AAUP and the Association of American Colleges (now the Association of American Colleges and Universities—AAC&U) developed the influential “1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure,” which reaffirmed that “freedom and economic security, hence, tenure, are indispensable to the success of an institution in fulfilling its obligations to its students and to society” (AAUP, 2001, p.3). These ideas were subsequently institutionalized in the policies and practices of most U.S. colleges and universities.
Another joint statement (known as the “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities”)—issued in 1966 by the AAUP, the American Council on Education, and the Association of Governing Boards—established the idea that a joint effort of faculty and administrators in shaping institutional decision-making and strategic direction was essential to the integrity and vitality of higher education. The AAUP had addressed this issue in 1920, and one year after its founding it had established a committee to address matters of college and university “government,” since the founders recognized the central significance of governance, of the roles of trustees and faculty, and of the conception of a public trust to academic freedom. The joint statement was not primarily about the power of the faculty but about its responsibility for the quality and direction of the institutions.
Joint authority over the academic workplace has become widely institutionalized in the framing and practice of “shared governance.” Notably, one of the three rationales provided for affirming faculty’s shared responsibility for governing colleges and universities speaks to professors’ mobility: “[R]egard for the welfare of the institution remains important despite the mobility and interchange of scholars” (AAUP, 2001, p. 218). Dupont Circle complemented Carnegie’s influence on the academic profession by underscoring the local governance role of cosmopolitan scholars, by which they helped shape the life of their employing institutions.
Creating a stratified professoriate
Almost from its inception, the Carnegie Foundation shaped the U.S. academic profession’s conceptions of quality through its reports on curricular areas such as medical education, the standardized tests it developed and promoted, and a system for classifying institutions. Each prioritizes the national over the local in defining quality.
In the first decades of its existence, the foundation issued significant reports on the organization of postsecondary education in key realms. None of these was better known or more influential than the 1910 Flexner Report, which reshaped medical education in the U.S. in both the number and type of schools (for example, leading to the closure of a number of women’s and Black medical schools) and their curricular structure. This and other reports established the idea that high quality is connected to high exclusivity.
In a related vein, the Carnegie Foundation, along with some other organizations (including ACE) developed tests and spawned organizations that created national exams that would determine students’ entrance into colleges and graduate schools across the country. For instance, a decade after its creation of the Graduate Record Examination, the foundation, working with the College Entrance Examination Board and ACE, assembled elements of its testing activities and personnel to form the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which develops and scores tests such as the SAT today.
Colleges and universities use such tests under the assumption that locally generated measures, such as high-school and college grade-point averages, are not as reliable or standardized as “objective” tests that are generated and scored nationally—this despite 1) the fact that scholars have raised questions about the cultural bias of such tests, and 2) considerable evidence that the high school GPA is at least as good a predictor of college grades and graduation as is the general SAT. [Editor’s note: see Saul Geiser’s article in this issue for a discussion of research on the SAT at the University of California.]
Another embedded premise in aptitude tests is that quality is a function not of achievement (mastering a body of knowledge) but of performance on a bell-shaped distribution of student performance that compares students to one another (that is, the tests are “norm referenced” rather than “criterion referenced”). The use of these examinations reinforces the national orientation of the Carnegie Foundation’s early work and further embeds the idea that quality equals exclusivity, underscoring higher education’s sorting role rather than planting the idea that it is possible to have widespread excellence.
A third area of activity that has shaped the structure and spirit of the academic profession is the foundation’s classification of institutions. Ironically, given the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s name, in its first few decades the classification system valorized graduate education and research, particularly externally funded research. From its inception until the 2000 update, that hierarchy was particularly evident—for example in the categories of Research I and Research II universities. Subsequent classifications have reduced this hierarchical dimension (e.g., in 2000, Doctoral/Research Extensive and Doctoral/Research Intensive replaced Research I and II and Doctoral I and II) But the 2005 “Basic Classification” still stratifies research universities by Research/Very High, Research/High, and Doctoral/Research.
The national classification has become for many a ranking system, in spite of Carnegie’s strong warnings against such uses. At the top of the hierarchy is research, which is more nationally situated, pursued, and evaluated than is teaching. Once again, prestige attaches more to national than to local activity, and stratification is connected to exclusivity (as is particularly clear in the earlier categorization of Liberal Arts I and II by selectivity).
Creating a counterbalance
In the latter decades of the 20th century, the Carnegie Foundation worked to counterbalance some of the effects of its earlier activities. For instance, as noted above, the multiple revisions of the Carnegie classification system have been undertaken to counter the tendency of institutions to interpret the classification as a ranking system. That attempt has been an explicit reaction to institutional aspirations to move “up” the classification scheme—from colleges to universities, from master’s- to doctoral-granting, from doctoral to research university status, and from Research II to Research I.
The most recent update, in 2005, moves from a single system to multiple classifications that reflect what is taught, to whom, and in what setting. It reemphasizes the instructional program and student body. And it provides customized, elective criteria by which institutions may be categorized. Rather than fostering hierarchy, the aim is to encourage institutional movement and innovation in a variety of other directions.
The first elective category to be developed was, significantly, community outreach and engagement. If the effect of Carnegie’s efforts (and those of Dupont Circle and AAUP) in the first three-quarters of the 20th century was to inscribe in academic structures and in the consciousness of faculty a national orientation, those organizations are increasingly emphasizing the value of the local.
For instance, in the past two decades Carnegie has undertaken one project after another highlighting the significance of undergraduate education; the value of programs that foster students’ moral development and civic engagement; the need for more connected, integrative approaches to learning; and the preparation of graduate students for their roles as teachers. The 1990 report, Scholarship Reconsidered, reemphasized the core values and activities of the academic profession that connect it more to the public good and public service than to the academic prestige market and revenue generation. That model emphasized not only teaching but also the application of scholarship in local contexts. A key goal was to shift the priorities of the professoriate by reworking the institutional and professional structures that shape and channel its spirit. Most recently, along these lines, in October of 2007, the Foundation organized a special convening workshop, “Toward a Vision of the 21st Century Professoriate,” a meeting that built on its recent efforts and also on initiatives led by various Dupont Circle organizations.
Looking Forward
The challenges confronting any effort to imagine new possibilities for a 21st century professoriate are grounded partly in the structures established by the Carnegie Foundation, Dupont Circle, and the AAUP and partly in conditions that have led us away from the model envisioned by those organizations. With an academic workforce that is now roughly two-thirds contingent employees, the vast majority of the professoriate 1) is not national in orientation (neither is it local, for colleges and universities are not committed to these employees and generally do not enable them to academically engage with the communities in which they are embedded); 2) lacks security, academic freedom, and the opportunity to be involved in academic and organizational decision making; and 3) accumulates not prestige but disadvantage in invisible positions.
Moreover, with roughly half of the professoriate aged 50 or older and the bulk of new appointments off the tenure track, we face the prospect of not being able to provide opportunities for a new generation of professors at precisely the time when the changing demographics of our prospective students will call for a more diverse, creative, and energized academic profession to help them—and in the process, the higher education system and the nation—more fully realize their potential.
Here I suggest how the AAUP, working with other organizations, might imagine possibilities for the 21st century professoriate. I also suggest a process for generating, debating, and implementing initiatives that will advance the American academic profession and higher education system.
I begin with three premises. The first is that what so many people refer to as the “new realities” of American higher education will prevent us from enhancing our global position educationally and economically. The last quarter century has seen a decline in our educational position in the world, whether measured by the proportion of 25-34 year olds with bachelors degrees (by 2005 we had dropped to 10th among the OECD nations), our appeal to international graduate student talent (Australia and the U.K. have been increasingly successful in attracting international students, and more Chinese and Indian students are staying home as these systems get stronger), or our share of scientific publications in high-citation sites. In short, the “new realities” on which we have been operating have compromised our position globally. So to accept them as inevitable is to resign ourselves to falling further and further behind.
My second premise is that even in a massive, decentralized system like ours, it is possible, with the right leverage points, to effect change in policies and practices. The history of the Carnegie Foundation attests to this possibility, as do the joint efforts of the Dupont Circle associations and the AAUP. These relatively small entities have fundamentally shaped professional practice in higher education.
My third premise is that the strength of our information-based economy and democracy are directly connected to the strength of the professoriate, which is not only a key source of knowledge creation but educates all knowledge workers. As such, the professoriate and higher education are quintessential public goods that must be sustained and invested in.
Fostering engagement in local communities
A dramatic and compelling vision does not involve simply extrapolating what we are into the future. Andrew Carnegie understood this, as do all great entrepreneurs, economic and social. He understood that to build a national academic profession that would be preeminent in the world would take an enormous investment of public and private monies. Developing a portable retirement system for all faculty nationally was neither a small nor an inexpensive endeavor. If we are to imagine a professoriate that retains its (inter)national dimension and counterbalances that with a commitment to applying knowledge in local, state, and regional settings, we too must think on a systemic scale.
The unwitting outcome of value system that prioritizes a “cosmopolitan” model of professionals who circulate in (inter)national labor markets has been a profession that is increasingly detached from the communities in which it is situated. We can imagine a more balanced professoriate in which academics are “local cosmopolitans” or “cosmopolitan locals” who are connected professionally not only to (inter)national networks but also to local networks outside of academe. Many professors, particularly first-generation and faculty of color, go unrewarded (and are even punished) for such local engagement (Baez, 2000; Rhoades et al., 2007).
To change our conception of the professoriate, we must go beyond endless discussions of professional reward systems and utilize the systemic leverage points that the Carnegie Foundation employed early on to shape the spirit of academe. One leverage point that would be especially valuable for young faculty, other newly graduated professionals, and contingent faculty would be loan forgiveness and/or expanded healthcare benefits for those who fulfill social-service requirements involving, say, outreach work in low-income schools and communities (many medical schools have such plans, in connection to working in underserved communities). An increased retirement contribution on the same terms could have a similar effect on senior faculty.
A number of entities, including insurers, would need to work together to make such benefits a reality. And they would need to develop rules regarding the types and extent of engagement that would be required for applicants to receive a “social contribution” benefit, as well as work with school leaders, community groups, and the federal government to structure opportunities for volunteers’ activities. But such a program could help address national concern about college tuition and student debt by providing a socially desirable set of service activities that newly graduated students could engage in as members of a national “Academic Community Corps” in order to work off their debt.
Ensuring faculty engagement in college life
Much has been made in recent years of the importance not only of student engagement with college but of academics’ engagement with their institutions and students. More than just a matter of holding faculty accountable, academic administrators are becoming increasingly concerned about which academics to tap for academic initiatives (for example, developing learning outcomes measures and data), and they are wondering who will be the next generation of academic department heads and deans.
Faculty engagement in college and student life will depend upon institutions’ providing a significantly greater measure of security and academic freedom to a largely contingent academic workforce. As with tenure-track faculty, such conditions and protections are essential to enabling faculty to play a meaningful role in shared governance. The AAUP and Dupont Circle associations once issued joint statements on behalf of tenure-track faculty; they could create similar statements for contingent faculty.
Such joint statements should encourage more equitable treatment of faculty who work without tenure eligibility, in the process advancing us toward two key goals critical to higher education’s vitality. One is to increase accountability and quality. Too often, the assumption in discussions of accountability is that individual faculty members need to be held accountable. But it is increasingly clear that in an environment in which students are “consumers” and potential (or actual) donors, there is pressure to act as if “the customer is always right.” The logic of the market can trump academic standards. With no job security—and working in a context in which any student complaint, even when related to high expectations and tough standards, can lead to nonrenewal—contingent faculty are not in a good position to maintain academic standards.
A second goal towards which progress can be made is better decision-making. In recent years, much has been made of the need to be flexible and responsive to the market. But it has become increasingly apparent that speedy decision-making that involves impulsively chasing various markets can be unwise. Strategic decision-making in higher education would benefit from joint statements from the AAUP and the associations about the value of due diligence, deliberation, and debate, as well as of the need to act with dispatch.
Another joint effort could consist of professional development activities provided by the AAUP in partnership with institutional associations. Such activities would focus not on cultivating union leaders (the topic of the AAUP’s Summer Institute) but rather on developing and implementing key academic initiatives and/or appropriate measures of institutional and student outcomes. The aim would be to cultivate academic leadership among academics.
Creating new models of excellence and prestige beyond exclusion
Institutions and individual professors are increasingly becoming servants of status, and the prestige hierarchy of American higher education maps closely onto social stratification, exclusivity, and involvement in doctoral education and funded research. One counterbalance to this orientation is the Carnegie Foundation’s new system of multiple and elective classifications. But other contributions are needed. Important additional work could be done in commissioning reports and other public statements about professional practice, as well as in developing forms of documentation for higher education’s public-service mission.
Imagine a set of documents, text and video, that would capture faculty work in the multiple forms and contexts in which excellence is achieved in academe. Our engagement with our students and communities (as well as various forms of inquiry) can be made more visible now than ever before. And as we help the public understand what faculty do, we can attract and socialize graduate students and new faculty into academe.
What would be especially useful is the development of measures of excellence for the more inclusive aspects of the academy and academic work—along the lines of the Carnegie Foundation’s elective community engagement classification. For example, imagine a measure of an institution’s contribution to upward social mobility, one that would map the movement of entering classes and graduates in terms of the census tracts from which they come from and in which they go on, as graduates, to live. Rather than a testing industry that sorts students, it should now be possible to develop measures that would encourage more inclusive, broadly based conceptualizations of excellence.
An initiative for imagineering the 21st century professoriate
The above ideas are but a few examples of what might be done to shape the structure and spirit of the 21st century academic profession, with an eye to the role that might be played by the AAUP and organizations that have strongly shaped the profession in the past. But clearly there are other groups doing important work with profound implications for the future of academe. For example, two other major faculty organizations, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA), are key to academe’s future, for they represent around 400,000 faculty members and gather data and act on issues affecting faculty and higher education—and, in related work, public schooling.
In the July/August 2008 issue of Academe, the journal of the AAUP, William Plater, a key player in the 2007 Carnegie convening on the 21st century professoriate, suggests that the AAUP convene a meeting of interested parties from which would emerge a commission to articulate a new vision for the professoriate. Picking up on that idea, as the new General Secretary of the AAUP, I could imagine a future process coordinated by the association that borrows mechanisms utilized in the Carnegie Foundation’s earlier success in shaping the academic profession—for example, a series of reports (analogous to the early 20th-century ones), or a series of policy studies like those produced in the 1970s. The idea for the AAUP and other organizations would be to generate, debate, and implement initiatives such as the ones discussed above, to shape public policy and professional practice.
The aim would be to imagine a profession that is not so much narrowly circumscribed by teaching and learning with students in classrooms as one that is widely engaged—through scholarly, instructional, and outreach activities—in expansively teaching and leading us as institutions, communities, and a nation into a future of exciting possibilities.
Resources
AAUP (2006). Policy Documents and Reports, tenth edition. Washington, D.C.: American Association of
University Professors.
Baez, Benjamin (2000). Race related service and faculty of color: Conceptualizing critical agency in academe. Higher Education, 39, 3, 363-91.
Ben-David, Joseph (1977). Centers of Learning: Britain, France, Germany, and the U.S. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Boyer, Ernest L. (1990). Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities for the Professoriate. Princeton: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Clark, Burton R. (1998). Creating Entrepreneurial Universities: Organizational Pathways of Transformation. Oxford: IAU Press and Pergamon.
Clark, Burton R. (1983). The Higher Education System: Academic Organization in Cross-National Perspective. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Jencks, Christopher, and David Riesman (1968). The Academic Revolution. New York: Doubleday.
Rhoades, Gary, Judy Marquez Kiyama, Rudy McCormick, and Marisol Quiroz (2007). Local cosmopolitans and cosmopolitan locals: New models of professionals in the academy. The Review of Higher Education, 31, 2, 209-35.
Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades (2004). Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Gary Rhoades, formerly professor and director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education in the College of Education at the University of Arizona, has just assumed the position of general secretary of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).