The American faculty has been undergoing dramatic changes in
who it is, what it does, and the career trajectory of its members. While
many of the changes — especially the demographic ones — have been evident
for years, other key dimensions of the faculty’s transformation have been
far less visible. Taken together, these elements constitute, in effect, a
silent revolution.
. . .
. . . . Given the common perception that the academic marketplace has been
more static than dynamic for many years, many observers are surprised to
learn that fully one-third (33.5 percent) of the full-time faculty in two-
and four-year institutions in 1992 were in the first seven years of a
full-time academic career and that in 1998, the proportion of such new
entrants was 22.4 percent. Although the new faculty cohort that had
transformed American colleges and universities in the late 1960s, during
the last great era of expansion and substantial hiring, was very large —
constituting about half of all full-time faculty members — the more recent
junior cohorts have been impressively sizeable and, accordingly, will shape
who the faculty are and what they do for years to come.
. . . . [B]y 1992 [white males] no longer constituted even a majority (43.2
percent) among the new faculty cohort, dropping further to 36.5 percent in
1998. Indeed, to further dramatize the faculty’s transformation, if we add
a variable to capture the ever-growing tilt toward professional/ career
fields, we find that by 1992 only one in five (20.5 percent) recently hired
full- time faculty was a native-born white male teaching in a liberal arts
field, a proportion that shrank further to 18.6 percent by 1998. . . . .
. . . . By 1998, women had grown to 35.8 percent among all full-timers, and
among the recent hires they accounted for 43.8 percent.
. . . . Perhaps the sharpest difference between the contemporary faculty
and their predecessors a generation ago is seen in the kinds of academic
appointments they hold. In 1992, more than four-fifths (83.5 percent) of
the full-time experienced faculty (seven or more years of full-time
teaching experience) held “regular,” that is, tenure or tenure-track,
appointments, compared with only two-thirds of the new entrants (66.8
percent).
The escalation of full-time, “off-track” appointments is all the more
striking when viewed in historical perspective because such appointments
were almost unknown in 1969 — amounting to a miniscule 3.3 percent. While
the number and proportion of such “non-regular” full-time appointments grew
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the phenomenon has mushroomed in the 1990s.
Indeed, as Figure 2 shows, the majority of all full-time faculty
appointments made in the 1990s — new hires in 1993, 1995, and 1997 — were
off the tenure track. In other words, non- tenureable term appointments —
essentially nonexistent three decades ago — have become the norm, the modal
type of faculty appointment. Faculty members are being redeployed at an
amazing rate — and regular academic appointments are rapidly becoming less
common.
. . .
. . . . Accepting that some percentage of termers act like regulars on the
job, the majority of termers, it appears, do not. There are evident
differences, and the differences are suggestive, even provocative. Keeping
in mind that these off-track appointees nonetheless serve on full-time
appointments, we have found that those teaching-focused termers:
- Devote about five hours a week less to their institutional
responsibilities (as much as 10 fewer hours at the research universities)
than do their regular counterparts.
- Spend more time teaching, less time in service activities (governance
and committee work), and much less time in research.
- Are about twice as likely as regulars to spend no time whatsoever in
“informal interaction” with students. The disparity is even greater in
professional fields.
Granted that some term appointees, as noted, function similarly to regular
appointees, these data clarify that most do not. Most, in fact, play a
highly circumscribed, that is, specialized, role at their institutions,
usually centering on the teaching function. Perhaps the day of the
full-service professor — teaching, research, service — is becoming an
anachronism. There’s another interesting difference: These teaching-focused
appointees disproportionately include women, whereas, contrariwise, the
research-focused term appointees are predominantly men. More interesting
still, these data suggest that women termers are among the most satisfied
subgroups in the contemporary academic profession.
. . .
We foresee a future characterized by re-specialized academic work and by
potentially constrained academic careers in which the links between
individual faculty members and their institution are further attenuated,
that is, a situation in which increasing numbers of academics disengage
from long-term institutional commitment or, perhaps more accurately, are
being disengaged from such a commitment.
