Martin J. Finkelstein

Chalk lines : the politics of work in the managed university

Introduction: Education as National Pedagogy Randy Martin, Pratt Institute Section I: The Whole Business Academic Capitalism, Managed Professionals and Supply-side Higher Education Gary Rhoades & Sheila Slaughter, University of Arizona Recapturing Academic Business Christopher Newfield, University of California The Stratification of the Academy Zelda Gamson, University of Massachusetts The Ascent Towards Corporate Managerialism In American and Australian Universities Jan Currie, Murdoch University, Australia & Lesley Vidovich Section II: The Academys Labor Education for Public Life David Montgomery, Yale University Doing Academic Work Stefano Harney, Pace University & Frederick Moten, University of California Adjuncts and More Adjuncts: Labor Segmentation and the Transformation of Higher Education Vincent Tirelli, City University of New York The Last Good Job In America Stanley Aronowitz, City University of New York Section III: Siting Specifics, Striking Back Education, Job Skills or Workfare: The Crisis Facing Adult Literacy Education Today Emily Hacker & Ira Yankwitt In Defense of CUNY Bart Meyers, Brooklyn College Faculty, Students and Political Engagement Jeremy Smith Need a Break from Your Dissertation? Organize a Union William Vaughn

TEACHING PERFORMANCE NORMS IN ACADEMIA

As most faculty have autonomy in their teaching, social control mechanisms to guide teaching in the interests of clients are needed. Thus, this study posed the question: What is the normative system for undergraduate college teaching? To answer this question, the College Teaching Behaviors Inventory was administered to a sample of 800 faculty holding appointments in biology, history, mathematics, and psychology at Research I Universities and Comprehensive Colleges and Universities II. Principal components analysis was used to identify four patterns of teaching norms: interpersonal disregard, inadequate planning, moral turpitude, and particularistic grading. Analysis of variance was used to test for differences in the degree of impropriety accorded to these normative patterns by academics in the two types of institutions and in the four academic disciplines included in this inquiry. Although institutional differences were observed for interpersonal disregard and inadequate planning, disciplinary differences were not found for any of the four normative patterns. Conclusions and implications of these findings are presented.

Effects of a First-Semester Learning Community on Nontraditional Technical Students

The study consisted of 25 full-time Electronic Technician Certificate students with 16 randomly assigned to an experimental group registered in a team-taught learning community and with nine randomly assigned to a control group registered for individually taught unlinked classes. We hypothesized that the experimental group would have significantly better academic and social integration and more positive perceptions of their experiences than the control class as well as higher course grades and grade point averages, more contact with classmates and instructors, and greater commitment to college and second semester persistence. Both student self-reported surveys and institutional data were analyzed. Results indicated that the team-taught learning community did make a difference to its students and yielded quantitative and qualitative support for hypotheses dealing with student perceptions of academic and social integration. Findings failed to support hypotheses dealing with behavioral outcomes except for strong support for commitment to college.

Diversification in the Academic Workforce: The Case of the US and Implications for Europe

This paper examines two broad dimensions of change in the American academic profession: (1) demographic and generational change, including increasing feminization, changing attitudes toward the career-family balance, migration of faculty positions to the professions (versus the liberal arts) and away from the research university sector; and (2) changes in types of appointments, work and career tracks, including the decline of tenure and the rise of fixed term appointments, which involve more ‘specialized’ and less ‘place-bound’ work roles and alternative career tracks. It considers these changes more broadly in the context of the changing nature of work in a globalized economy and the changing nature of the knowledge industry and in the context of similar developments in Europe and Asia. It concludes with an extrapolation of how these trends are likely to play out in the US context and in a new ‘globalized’ academic marketplace over the next 10–20 years.

The Adaptation of Liberal Arts Colleges to the 1970s: An Analysis of Critical Events.

Among American institutions of higher education, four-year undergraduate colleges have proved most vulnerable to the impact of declining enrollments, inflation, and fiscal austerity [13]. That vulnerability has been reflected in the past decade by a disproportionate number of institutional closures. At the same time, that vulnerability has spawned a diversity of less extreme, and frequently quite resilient, adaptive responses: some institutions have merged; among those persisting in their organizational identity, some have done so by greatly expanding their mission and program, while others have moved to refocus and even narrow their mission and program. Between September 1981 and September 1983, we undertook, with the support of the Exxon Education Foundation, a study aimed at understanding more about this diversity, and frequently resilience, of adaptive response [12]. Specifically, we sought to develop approaches to categorizing types of adaptive response, to explain these types, and, finally, to assess the consequences for individual institutions of responses made and not made. Initially, our efforts to categorize modes of institutional adaptation took the form of a secondary analysis of the responses of eighty-six liberal arts colleges to the 1978 Carnegie Councils Survey of Institutional Adaptations to the 1970s. That secondary cluster analysis yielded

The Balance Between Teaching and Research in the Work Life of American Academics

Since the Second World War, academic work came to be structured by institutional type and academic field. Faculty in research universities spent their time in different ways than those at baccalaureate colleges and faculty in the sciences or professional fields in very different ways from those in the humanities and social sciences. As academic work and careers evolve, we are now seeing increasing diversification within institutional types and academic fields—primarily on the bases of gender and type of appointment (regular, full-time vs. part-time and limited term). Teaching and research are increasingly being undertaken by different kinds of faculty on different kinds of appointments rather than as an integrated set of responsibilities of every faculty member. Within the context of this increasing role specialization as between teaching and research, two trends seem clear: the teaching emphasis of faculty work has grown, while the resources and actual faculty effort devoted to research have slightly declined. Some of that may be attributable to the rise of full-time nontenure eligible, limited contract faculty with more highly specialized roles. More American faculty are now engaged in either teaching or research than at any time in the last half century, and it is the “pure” teacher contingent that is growing. Moreover, the actual publication productivity of American academics has declined over the past 15 years (1992–2007)—that is, fewer resources and less time invested have resulted in less productivity by the conventional standard of scholarly publications.

The United States of America: Perspectives on Faculty Governance, 1992–2007

This analysis compares the US faculty role in academic governance as reflected in the 1992 Carnegie International Survey of the Academic Profession and in the 2007 follow-up, the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey. In addition, it places US faculty responses in the context of those of academic staff in five developed countries. The results suggest that American faculty remain preeminent in their influence on faculty appointments and promotion and on some aspects of curriculum, while their role is more limited in the areas of administrator selection and budget. Faculty in research universities, in particular, have ceded influence to academic deans – as, to some extent, have senior executives. US faculty appear overall to be less influential than their Canadian, German, and Japanese colleagues. And while academic managerialism may be more decentralized in the USA than elsewhere, it is no less extensive.

How National Contexts Shape Academic Careers: A Preliminary Analysis

The purpose of this chapter is to take an initial step to build upon the work of Joseph Ben-David (Centers of learning: Britain, France, Germany, United States. McGraw-Hill, New York, 1977), Burton Clark (The higher education system: Academic organization in cross-national perspective. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1983) and Christine Musselin (The market for academics. Routledge, New York, 2010) with a view toward identifying the major structural features of national higher education system and academic markets that directly shape academic work and careers, collect some preliminary data on those features across a wide array of national systems, and develop a preliminary approach to categorizing those national system differences in ways that meaningfully allow them to be brought into multivariate analysis of large survey data sets. Here five heuristic models based on these 13 characteristics are introduced.

Translating abstinence education theory into practice: A case study of the implementation challenges of operationalizing logic models in federal demonstration projects

Federally financed programs designed to address social ills, including unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and substance abuse, among other health concerns, increasingly have been required to anchor their design in an underlying theory and research base, and their evaluation in methodologically rigorous, outcomes-based approaches. These approaches have included experimental design, randomization, and power analysis. At the same time, the implementation of federally financed programs increasingly has moved from government offices to small, nonprofit community agencies, and more and more has been based in public schools. This article focuses precisely on the challenges to faithful program implementation posed by the peculiarities of the school setting and by the limited capacities of most community agencies, as reflected in the case of one federal demonstration project, the Family Life Abstinence Program (FLAP). We begin with a brief description of the FLAP federal demonstration project, which focuses on promoting teenage sexual abstinence before marriage. We then describe the challenges in implementing this program. Next we proceed to draw on the available implementation literature to explain these challenges in terms of the characteristics of schools and community agencies as organizations. We conclude with suggestions for offsetting the impediments we have identified.

Floodlights, Spotlights, and Flashlights: Tenure Meets the Glare of Empirical Social Science

Is tenure a prerequisite for academic quality or inimical to it? Three new books, all with different approaches, report startlingly similar conclusions: tenure systems do not necessarily hurt, and contract systems do not necessarily support, academic quality, organizational flexibility, or individual career development. Although not differentiating satisfactorily between tenure and contract systems, the volumes highlight the imperative for institutions to monitor personnel policies and their mission-related consequences with greater self-awareness.