Jack H. Schuster – författare

Higher education is becoming destabilized in the face of extraordinarily rapid change. The composition of the academy's most valuable asset-the faculty-and the essential nature of faculty work are being transformed. Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein describe the transformation of the American faculty in the most extensive and ambitious analysis of the American academic profession undertaken in a generation. A century ago the American research university emerged as a new organizational form animated by the professionalized, discipline-based scholar. The research university model persisted through two world wars and greatly varying economic conditions. In recent years, however, a new order has surfaced, organized around a globalized, knowledge-based economy, powerful privatization and market forces, and stunning new information technologies. These developments have transformed the higher education enterprise in ways barely imaginable in generations past. At the heart of that transformation, but largely invisible, has been a restructuring of academic appointments, academic work, and academic careers-a reconfiguring widely decried but heretofore inadequately described.This volume depicts the scope and depth of the transformation, combing empirical data drawn from three decades of national higher education surveys. The authors' portrait, at once startling and disturbing, provides the context for interpreting these developments as part of a larger structural evolution of the national higher education system. They outline the stakes for the nation and the challenging work to be done.

Over the past 70 years, the American university has become the global gold standard of excellence in research and graduate education. The unprecedented surge of federal research support of the post-World War II American university paralleled the steady strengthening of the American academic profession itself, which managed to attract the best and brightest educators from around the world while expanding the influence of the "faculty factor" throughout the academic realm. But in the past two decades, escalating costs and intensifying demands for efficiency have resulted in a wholesale reshaping of the academic workforce, one marked by skyrocketing numbers of contingent faculty members. Extending Jack H. Schuster and Martin J. Finkelstein's richly detailed classic The American Faculty: The Restructuring of Academic Work and Careers, this important book documents the transformation of the American faculty-historically the leading global source of Nobel laureates and innovation-into a diversified and internally stratified professional workforce.Drawing on heretofore unpublished data, the book provides the most comprehensive contemporary depiction of the changing nature of academic work and what it means to be a college or university faculty member in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The rare higher education study to incorporate multinational perspectives by comparing the status and prospects of American faculty to teachers in the major developing economies of Europe and East Asia, The Faculty Factor also explores the redistribution of academic work and the ever-more diverse pathways for entering into, maneuvering through, and exiting from academic careers. Using the tools of sociology, anthropology, and demography, the book charts the impact of waves of technological change, mass globalization, and the severe financial constraints of the last decade to show the impact on the lives and careers of those who teach in higher education. The authors propose strategic policy recommendations to extend the strengths of American higher education to retain leadership in the global economy.Written for professors, adjuncts, graduate students, and academic, political, business, and not-for-profit leaders, this data-rich study offers a balanced assessment of the risks and opportunities posed for the American faculty by economic, market-driven forces beyond their control.

American colleges and universities are poised at the edge of a remarkable transformation. But while rapid technological changes and increasingly intense competition for funding are widely recognized as signs of a new era, there has also been an unprecedented though silent demographic change in the profile of the faculty. In The New Academic Generation, higher education researchers Martin Finkelstein, Robert Seal, and Jack Schuster focus on the changing face of academe, as women, foreign-born, and minority scholars enter the professoriate in larger numbers and as alternatives to full-time tenure-eligible appointments take hold. Looking at who will teach at American colleges and universities in the future and examining their roles and responsibilities, the authors argue that the new generation will usher in an era of dramatic change with profound long-term implications. Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster base their analysis on the 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.The largest national survey of faculty in a quarter-century, it provides detailed analyses permitting the authors to describe the characteristics of the relatively new entrants into academic careers, and to compare them with their more senior colleagues. The authors present their analysis in 88 tables, describe their findings, examine future issues for teaching-learning communities, and provide strategies for strengthening the faculty-and thereby higher education itself. The challenges posed by this new academic generation, they conclude, will be one of the defining issues for American colleges and universities for years to come.