Abstract
In many, if not all, national settings, the context for academic work has undergone dramatic changes over the past three decades. National and state priorities have come to place a greater emphasis on basic education, health, and welfare. A new ideology has emerged stressing the private as contrasted to the public benefits of higher education. Higher education in most countries has expanded so as to serve the “masses,” but public funding has not increased at the same pace. And stakeholders have raised critical voices concerning certain practices of the higher education sector. Thus, higher education is under stress, and this has impacted the working conditions as well as the terms of employment of many academics. This chapter reviews these recent changes, considers their likely impact on the nature of academic work, and outlines how the several chapters of the book will explore these trends. Particular attention is devoted to the relevance and internationalization of the academy and to new trends in management and governance.
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Notes
- 1.
Except in the biological and physical sciences (Leslie 2007).
- 2.
We speak to this very issue in Chap. 8 on governance and management.
- 3.
During the eighteenth century, the USA was populated with freestanding baccalaureate colleges and a few universities in name only. These institutions offered a fixed baccalaureate course and were typically staffed by temporary tutors. The development of more permanent professorships and the emergence of a full-time, exclusive academic caree developed in the middle and last part of the nineteenth century (see McCaughey 1974; Tobias (2002).
- 4.
As we shall see later in this chapter, the founding, in the case of the USA, of the American Association of University professors in 1915 demonstrated a sort of cross-disciplinary professorial self-consciousness well into the twentieth century.
- 5.
In the case of public institutions, such governing boards usually included the appointees of public officials who often coordinated with state departments of education.
- 6.
Over time, organizations like the AAUP have emerged in many other systems. For example, the Association of National University Professors and the Association of Private University Professors were established in Japan in 1946 to promote the material interests of professors as well as to protect their academic freedom. A common factor in the emergence of such associations is the expanding scale of higher education. With the expansion of national systems, the stakeholders also increased, as did the diversity of views on the proper role of higher education. Tensions multiplied as did the frequency of troubling cases. And thus there emerged the motivation to form associations focused on protecting the interests of academics and the academy.
- 7.
The latter three were funded by coordinated grants from the Kellogg Foundation. For a description of the development of higher education as a field of study in the USA, see Lewis Mayhew Higher Education as a Field of Study (Dressel and Mayhew 1970).
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Cummings, W.K., Finkelstein, M.J. (2012). The Changing Academic Profession in the USA. In: Scholars in the Changing American Academy. The Changing Academy – The Changing Academic Profession in International Comparative Perspective, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2730-4_1
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