National Center for Postsecondary Improvement Page 3
Public universities have long been central to the success of the national higher educa-
tion enterprise, pursuing distinctive missions while responding to changing societal
expectations to expand and diversify their functions. In recent years, however, a num-
ber of decision-makers and opinion-shapers—federal and state legislators, educational
officials, citizens’ groups, and others—have generated external pressures on public
universities, demanding reductions in cost, increased accountability, greater attention to
undergraduate education, and wider scrutiny of faculty productivity. While these
pressures have also affected private colleges and universities, cumulative pressure from
the states on public universities has prompted the latter to search for new revenue
sources and redesigned delivery systems. Within this political and economic climate, it
is essential to consider how the challenges facing public universities today may funda-
mentally affect the lives of faculty within them. The importance of such a task is made
clear when it is recalled that among the diverse institutional settings within which
American faculty work, public universities employ the largest proportion of the U.S.
academic profession of any sector in the higher education system.
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For over a decade, interested observers have expressed concern that the post–World
War II decades of academic opportunity, financial support, and public esteem for faculty
have waned, making universities less desirable workplaces.
2
For the most part, observ-
ers have focused on the changing mix of expectations and resources for faculty, noting
declining economic conditions and conflicting messages about how faculty should
spend their time.
Contemporary discourse on the problems plaguing public higher education reaffirms
these concerns, as academic organizations are criticized for their inherent inefficiency.
Faculty are increasingly cast either as the problem—characterized as unproductive and
self-interested—or as an obstacle to the solution, with norms for shared governance
rendering faculty participation at best ineffective, at worst, obstructionist. The degree
to which such unfavorable conceptions of faculty have become widespread is striking;
so, too, is the extent to which a new style of academic management has simultaneously
become more legitimate. Particularly in public universities, these two perceptions have
become mutually reinforcing. The locus of control for decision-making is shifting away
from departments and their faculties and toward various state-level actors and univer-
sity spokespersons, who continually assert the need for even greater managerial flexibil-
ity to make a wide range of difficult resource allocation decisions, including those with
educational implications.
This trend is significant because, among other reasons, it runs counter to the traditional
expectations that faculty bring to their workplaces. Across fields of study, generations
of academics have been socialized to expect the ideal of shared governance or, stated
more pragmatically, the right to active participation or at least consultation in academic
