The institutional loyalty of college faculty members in the United States dropped sharply during the past two decades, according to the results of an international study, scheduled to be presented in Chicago on Saturday at a National Education Association conference on higher education.
From 1992, when faculty members around the world were first surveyed as part of the international study, to 2007, when such surveys were administered a second time, the proportion of American faculty members indicating a moderate or strong sense of loyalty to their institutions declined from 90 percent to 61 percent, the study found.
Faculty members in many of the other countries examined similarly showed declines in their institutional loyalty over that period and started out with less institutional loyalty to begin with. But the decline charted in the United States was among the steepest, according to a new analysis of the study’s data written by Martin J. Finkelstein, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University, and published in “The NEA 2012 Almanac of Higher Education,” released Friday.
Among other nations examined, the proportion of faculty members expressing moderate or strong loyalty to their institutions declined from 87 percent to 51 percent in Australia, from 80 percent to 63 percent in Japan, from 97 to 74 in South Korea, and from 84 to 38 percent in the Britain. In Germany it rose, from 34 percent to 51 percent.
The article was derived from data from “The Changing Academic Profession” study, which involved surveys of faculty members in 20 nations, as well as Hong Kong, conducted in 2007 and 2008. That study was a follow-up to a landmark 1992 survey of faculty members in 13 nations and Hong Kong, overseen and financed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In a 2009 analysis of the findings from the second round of surveys, Mr. Finkelstein and William K. Cummings, a professor of international education and international affairs at George Washington University, said faculty members at four-year colleges in the United States stand out in their insularity from the international academic community and their sense of a lack of power over their institutions’ leadership and budgets.
Among its other findings, Mr. Finkelstein’s latest analysis of international survey data found that the United States stood out as having more faculty members over the age of 55 and fewer under the age of 40 than most other nations examined.
