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...

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...