The Faculty

Marilyn Humphries, Newscom

Too many Ph.D.s, not enough jobs. Contrary to predictions in the 1980s of mass retirements, full-time, tenure-track positions have become the exception. The result: a transformation in the role, influence, and lifestyle of the college professor. As part-time and contingent instructors cobbled together livings at more than one institution, and as administrators with eyes on the bottom line adopted a “customer first” mindset, faculty governance weakened, collegiality and marriages were strained, and — as one article featured here describes — academic politics sometimes reached absurd levels. Recently adjuncts have banded together to fight back. What hasn’t changed? A story about the “pipeline problem” for black faculty members could be written just as easily today as in 1986.

January 4, 1971

Shortage of Academic Positions for Ph.D.’s Seen Worsening in Next 20 Years

“We have created a graduate education and research establishment in American universities that is about 30 to 50 percent larger than we shall effectively use in the 1970’s and early 1980’s, and the growth process continues in many sectors,” Allan M. Cartter, chancellor and executive vice-president of New York University, said. … Mr. Cartter also saw little hope that Ph.D. production would decline.

November 19, 1979

The Sad State of Faculty Governance

The faculty’s role in institutional governance today is declining, and may be in jeopardy.

Consumerism has entered the picture, with the rising awareness that those an institution serves — students, alumni, the public in general — have a role in its management, if for no other reason than that they pay the bills. For better or worse, the result has been a diluting of authority under the concept of shared institutional government, with the faculty’s voice as only one among several.

September 10, 1986

Women Flock to Graduate School in Record Numbers, but Fewer Blacks Are Entering the Academic Pipeline

… [W]hen higher-education institutions look for replacements for the large number of senior professors who will retire within the next 15 years, plenty of female faculty members will be available. … However, lingering sexual bias in hiring and promotion decisions, as well as a shortage of women with doctorates in scientific fields, may cloud the promise that women may achieve parity.

50 Years of The Chronicle of Higher Education

This special issue of The Chronicle offers some of the best and most representative journalism of our first 50 years — from the turbulence of the 1960s to the present moment of financial constraint and accountability. And it’s all yours, free for downloading. Download The Chronicle’s 50th-Anniversary Anthology.

• The World
• Race on Campus
• Technology
• The Chronicle: How We Got Here
• The End Is the Beginning
• Timeline: 50 Years of Higher Education
• An Era of Protests
• Download The Chronicle’s 50th-Anniversary Anthology

If there ever were a time for colleges and universities to increase the number of minority-group members on their faculties especially blacks — this is it.

Chances are it won’t happen.

Instead, the new generation of professors that will oversee America’s college classrooms by the year 2000 could be as homogeneous as previous generations, even though, in some states, the majority of students they teach will come from minority groups.

November 1, 1989

Feeling Disillusioned? Unappreciated?

Professors — obsessed with being perfect, eager to criticize, disillusioned after years of sacrifice in graduate school — may be making themselves emotionally ill.One psychologist believes that such a pattern has given rise to what he sees as an emotional disorder unique to the professoriate. He has given it a name — “professorial melancholia.”

June 13, 1997

Empty Tables at the Faculty Club Worry Some Academics

Baltimore
The faculty table at the Johns Hopkins Club is all but deserted on a recent spring day. A lone professor, graying and spectacled, sits surrounded by seven empty chairs. The “big table,” as it’s known, has turned into a table for one.

August 8, 1997

An Aging Faculty Poses a Challenge for Colleges

For professors and their institutions, the question of when to retire has become more complicated since 1994, when a federal rule that exempted higher education from the Age Discrimination in Employment Act expired, ending a widespread tradition of forced retirement at age 70.

Mandatory retirement pushed some scholars off campus before they were ready to go, but it gave administrators the ability to predict faculty openings. Even if Professor Doe didn’t want to retire at 65 or 68, his college knew he would have to leave at 70.

April 21, 2000

A Couple’s Struggle to Find Good Jobs in the Same City

The influx of women into Ph.D. programs has made graduate schools a perfect mating ground. As a result, faculty recruiters are spending more and more time on the “two-body problem” — job candidates who have academic spouses in tow.

August 4, 2000

Alleged Death Threats, a Hunger Strike, and a Department at Risk Over a Tenure Decision

Sure, there were the internecine backstabbings and poison-pen missives we’ve come to expect of this process. And the usual personality conflicts, professional jealousy, and generational divides again held sway as this contentious rite of passage played itself out in Bloomington.

But then things got weird.

November 5, 2012

Adjuncts Build Strength in Numbers

When professors in positions that offer no chance of earning tenure begin to stack the faculty, campus dynamics start to change. Growing numbers of adjuncts make themselves more visible. They push for roles in governance, better pay and working conditions, and recognition for work well done. And they do so at institutions where tenured faculty, although now in the minority, are still the power brokers.

March 20, 2015

Tenure Is on Life Support

Earlier this month, the University of Tennessee system coined the term “de-tenure,” apparently by accident. The system’s president immediately got an earful (on Twitter of all places) that the ability to de-tenure someone would defeat the very purpose of tenure. Whether or not university officials actually believed that argument, they at least backed off their initial effort to make de-tenuring a possibility.