http://derekbruff.org/blogs/tomprof/2012/04/02/tp-msg-1166-three-faculty-communities-academic-labor-across-institutional-types/
As more
and more reports on US higher education point to deteriorating conditions for
faculty members and threats to their professional status, those of us who teach
in colleges and universities need to undertake a detailed examination of faculty
work and identity. An accurate understanding of academic labor is critical, as
the claims about us can shape both policy and practice.
Notwithstanding
efforts to encapsulate US academic labor?college and university faculty?in one
aggregated understanding, as education professors Jack Schuster and Martin
Finkelstein did in their book The American Faculty, the academic community is in
fact a number of communities. These communities are best conceptualized by
looking at the missions and purposes of their institutional types. The exception
to this conceptualization is likely those who work part time: their labor has
much in common across institutional types, with teaching as their principal
activity and research and service as nonexistent or negligible. Full-time
nontenure-track faculty constitute another occupational class outside the
traditional notion of the academic community. For full-time faculty, a category
that at many institutions includes full-time non-tenure-track faculty, the
institutional context shapes behaviors and reinforces attitudes and values. In
other words, full-time faculty conform to their
institutional context and
adopt the professional identity that characterizes their institution: research
institutions are sustained by knowledge developers, comprehensive universities
by knowledge disseminators, and community colleges by knowledge applicators.
Recent research I have undertaken with Virginia Montero-Hernandez and
Sarah Yoshikawa addresses full-time faculty work and identity at three distinct
institutions: a research university, a comprehensive university, and a community
college. Our project is unique not only in its data collection through field
methods research at three institutions of different types, all located in the
same community, but also in its analysis of interview data. We used theoretical
concepts drawn from sociological, anthropological, psychological, and higher
education literature.
For the study, we examined the identities and
practices of faculty in biology, psychology, chemistry, and sociology. We found
high levels of consonance, not across institutions within the categories of
discipline or program, but within institutions. This consonance suggests that
faculty community is tied to faculty labor?and labor and the discourse about
this labor are aligned with the institution.
Our research drew on the
Carnegie classifications. In adopting these rubrics in 2005 and instituting them
in 2010, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching established a
complex framework for the classification of institutions of higher education in
the United States in order to represent institutional differences. Within the
basic classification framework, drawn from the traditional classification
framework of six types?associate?s colleges, doctorate-granting universities,
master?s colleges and universities, baccalaureate colleges, special-focus
institutions, and tribal colleges?we focus on three types: doctorate-granting
universities, master?s colleges and universities, and associate?s colleges.
Within these types, we address faculty in three subcategories: research
universities (with very high research activity); master?s colleges and
universities (with large programs); and associate?s colleges (public multicampus
institutions serving urban areas).
Among the public and private
institutions, including for-profit ones, there are 283 research institutions
(very high research, high research, and doctoral/research), 663 master?s
institutions (large, medium, and small), and 1,814 associate?s institutions
(generally community colleges). Numbers of both full- and part-time faculty at
the three institutional types are surprisingly similar: 392,500 at doctoral
institutions, 239,900 at master?s institutions, and 374,000 at community
colleges, according to the US Department of Education. As a whole, college and
university faculty constitute a significant labor force; they are not, however,
a homogeneous professional body.
Three Types of Faculty
The
self-characterizations of faculty work and professional identity match the
purposes and missions of the distinct institutions. At a research university, a
chemistry professor we interviewed characterizes his professional role in 2010
as primarily research-oriented and his labor as entrepreneurial: ?So it?s very
much like running a small business. You have to be able to do most things
yourself... . The things I talk about, like communication, getting research
grants, and all that, it?s not so different from what a small businessperson
would have to do. And so you have to be ... self-sufficient and independent in
that way.?
This characterization aligns with that of the ?academic
capitalist? popularized by higher education professors Sheila Slaughter and
Larry L. Leslie in their 1997 book, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and
the Entrepreneurial University, and followed by other works on a similar theme
in the past fourteen years. Conceptualizations of academic labor in the United
States are normally developed through examinations of national statistics on
faculty that frame faculty as a nearly identical group engaged in identical
activities (for example, research, teaching, and service) and the study of
faculty at single types of institutions, which lead to a skewed understanding of
academic labor.
The chemist quoted above is a full-time tenured
professor at a public research university with a very high research profile, one
of 167 such institutions of higher education in the United States in 2010. His
self-characterization is vastly different from that of a full-time community
college chemistry instructor we interviewed: ?[Teaching is] what the job is all
about. It?s only teaching really... . We teach about sixteen hours. We have
about five classes, about sixteen hours with labs. Then we have office hours.
Six hours or something. And then for each class we teach, and an hour
preparation, grading and all that. And then we?re supposed to be ten hours
available for the community ... like working on a committee.?
This
professor?s characterization of faculty work at the community college is
consonant with that of scholars W. Norton Grubb and others, including me, who
conceive of this population as a teaching labor force. Community college faculty
work requires long hours of teaching students with a range of abilities and with
multiple identities and commitments, including family and work.
Another
interview subject, a full-time tenured biology professor at a master?s
institution, offers a third perspective on academic labor. She emphasizes a
large teaching load, considerable work with students, committee work (which she
does not enjoy), and moderate attention to research publications:
"When
I chose this type of position, I ... wanted to get involved with students and
educate them in the science of biology and how to do research and how to be
engaged in finding new knowledge, and making a difference in their life in a
very altruistic sense... . So research ... in the lab ... is not for me. It is
only for the students. It?s an opportunity for them to experience that. To me,
it means nothing anymore... . I know the reality is that for me to sustain the
kind of activity that would make it in terms of publications and new grants, I
don?t have that energy. I don?t have the inclination... . I was awarded a big
grant last year to train students in ... research. We got ... $1.4 million... .
And it started this year, so I have a lot of responsibilities keeping track of
the students, and we have new courses that we need to teach."
Her
characterization is comparable to accounts of university faculty in popular
culture and in studies of faculty work, such as Ernest Boyer?s 1990 book,
Scholarship Reconsidered, as well as in conceptions of the purposes of higher
education that address student education, such as Vincent Tinto?s theory of
student persistence and Estela Bensimon?s concept of equity for all, and
understandings of the public good embedded in the work of Ann Austin, William
Tierney, Brian Pusser, and others.
Three Distinct Institutions
At the public research university, full-time faculty in the fields we
studied direct their energies and labor to the creation of scientific knowledge,
making sense of the nature and order of the natural and social world. When we
asked another chemistry professor what had motivated him to pursue academic work
when he was a graduate student, he replied that it was research and the
preparation of future researchers: ?Watching faculty up close and personal, and
to see somebody who was on the top of their game and ... the purpose of being
there was to do [the] best research that they could and to train the next
generation in the discipline ... I just thought, ?Wow, how great is that???
These research faculty participate in an environment that emphasizes
knowledge construction, research productivity, research grant seeking,
competition, and prestige. They view undergraduate students as ethnically
diverse in their backgrounds and uneven in their academic performance. Hence,
graduate students, who exhibit academic competencies that enable them to engage
in research activities, are more prominent in the academic lives of research
university faculty. Research faculty recruit graduate students and work closely
with them to promote the production of knowledge and the expansion of the
scientific community through mentorship and career guidance. The student-faculty
relationship, in which graduate students work hand in hand with faculty members
to ensure research productivity, enables the strengthening of the academic self
as oriented toward the abstract and scientific.
Meanwhile, at the public
master?s university, full-time faculty in these areas direct their energies and
labor toward finding ways to communicate the relevance and meaning of research
through their teaching. Another chemistry professor at a master?s institution
notes her understanding of both her personal characteristics and talents and her
goals as a professor: ?I?m not cut out to be a Nobel Prize scientist, and so I
am never going to contribute that way. But day after day, week after week, I can
make a difference in individual people?s lives as a chemistry teacher... . I
enjoy interacting with the students.?
Public master?s university faculty
participate in an environment that emphasizes knowledge construction and
teaching, as well as research and training grants. The students, who are
primarily undergraduates, are viewed as diverse in their backgrounds and in the
degrees they will attain. Faculty members endeavor to maintain continual and
close social interactions with undergraduate students to help them make sense of
science and its limitations and possibilities for intellectual development. The
purpose of this form of relationship is to instill in the student population the
interests and skills needed to pursue knowledge construction and application.
Community college faculty direct their energies and labor toward
providing academic support to nontraditional students. They participate in an
environment that emphasizes academic support, student services, effective
instruction, and academic remediation. Another biology professor not only
characterizes the student population in her community college but also
underlines her understanding of her professional role: ?I think what we do
really, really well, is the nurturing. Those students that are a little bit
shaky, we?re on them... . If you?ve got thirty of them in a lab, you can get
them and you can sort of nudge them and nag them and praise them and, you know,
kick them... . [If] we need to do a little pre-something, like pre-math or a
little pre-chemistry, then we?ve got time to do that. So it?s definitely a more
intimate experience [than at the university].?
Faculty work at the
community college frequently entails developing sustained and caring
relationships with an ethnically diverse student body in order to help students
make sense of and excel in an academic culture. The interactions with
nontraditional students reinforce the relational-supportive orientation of the
academic self of faculty members in community colleges.
Not a Singular
Institution
The implications?and thus the significance?of these
differences are pertinent not only to understandings of academic labor but also
to institutional practices. These differences characterize the nature of faculty
communities and help to place the traditional triumvirate of academic
labor?research, teaching, and service?into a more coherent context. Teaching at
a community college entails interpersonal relationships with students and
support connected to students? backgrounds, often as nontraditional students.
Teaching at a master?s institution involves not only the intellectual
development of students within the context of their academic attributes but also
the stimulation of knowledge construction and application through the social
interactions of faculty and students. At a research university, teaching can
entail large lectures and the dissemination of information without interpersonal
interaction with undergraduates, or it can involve intensive side-by-side
investigations
with one or more graduate students.
These
conditions, along with other institutional behaviors and reward structures for
faculty labor, shape and reinforce the faculty community at distinct
institutional types.
Mimetic tendencies across organizations are
misdirected when a research university models its instructional practices after
a community college, or a master?s university patterns its tenure standards
after those of a research university. Conceptually, it may be prudent to think
of the academic professions rather than the academic profession. This broader
frame of reference will be useful as scholars conceptualize contingent academic
labor and practitioners consider the reformation of governance structures for
different institutions, improvements in hiring so that particular kinds of
faculty fit particular kinds of institutions, and changes in the evaluation and
assessment of faculty work. Neither conceptualizations that assume a homogeneous
labor force nor practices that are standard across higher education institutions
will suffice.
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