Crisis on Campus_ A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities - Mark C. Taylor [15]
Unfortunately, this long and difficult apprenticeship frequently ends in failure. One of the dirty secrets of higher education is that only 35 percent of college and university positions are tenure or tenure-track. The remaining 65 percent of the workforce in higher education is made up of part-time adjuncts and teaching assistants, who are graduate students. If, at the end of this long process, I found myself in the unlikely position of having secured a rare tenure-track job, I would be in my late thirties, possibly with a wife and family, and tens of thousands of dollars in debt. My starting salary would be $55,000. If I did not get a job, I would take out another $150,000 in student loans and start law school. This story is not fanciful; I have seen it many times with former students, friends and colleagues. Those experiences are extremely frustrating for teachers as well as students and, from my point of view, raise serious ethical questions about encouraging young people to pursue graduate work in many fields.
As the number of jobs decreased, the demands for research and publication increased. With more and more people applying for fewer and fewer positions, faculty members and administrators making decisions needed new ways to distinguish among candidates. Research and publication came to play a much larger role in hiring and promotion decisions than in the past. Many schools never known for research, and faculty members who had published little or nothing, suddenly started asking young people to do what they themselves had never done. This increased demand for research and publication was part of a larger trend toward specialization in colleges and universities. But other factors were also at work.
Little attention has been paid to the importance for the academic world of the post–World War II transportation revolution. The globalization of higher education did not begin with the Internet but with airplanes. Over the past four decades, national and international seminars, symposia, colloquia and conferences have come to play a major role in the personal and professional lives of many globe-trotting faculty members. Prior to the mid-1960s, most academic meetings were local or at best regional affairs; faculty members attending drove or took buses and trains. Everything changed with the advent of cheap air travel. Faculty members were now jetting all over the world to meet with colleagues who shared their interests. With this development, new professional organizations and societies were established and new global networks emerged. The proliferation of these organizations actually narrowed the focus of research programs, and so-called cutting-edge work became more and more about less and less. These developments led to the further fragmentation of universities that were already riven by the recent diversification of the student body and faculty and the corresponding pluralization of curricula.
In an effort to attract members and raise money, professional societies sought to differentiate themselves from one another by restricting the focus of their activities. As new fields and programs were introduced, old departments began dividing themselves into ever narrower subfields. In a quest for recognition and academic legitimacy, each subfield established a professional organization to promote the interests of its members. As the fields of expertise became more restricted, the research of scholars working in them became more homogeneous, and communication among scholars with different concerns became less common. While claiming to embrace new methods that opened new lines of inquiry, too many academics took measures to protect their self-interest by policing their disciplinary borders and punishing those who crossed them.
In the new world of higher education that emerged in the latter half of the