The Last Professors

The Last Professors
Author: Frank Donoghue
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2008
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0823228592

Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces--social, political, and institutional--dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. --from publisher description.

The Last Professors

The Last Professors
Author: Frank Donoghue
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0823279146

“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered. In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor. Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts —with the humanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today’s market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers. Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other “crises,” Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s —that threaten the survival of professors as we’ve known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholars an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams. First published in 2008, "The Last Professors" have largely had its arguments borne out in the interim, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This new edition includes a substantial Preface that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough but productive analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.

The Last Lecture

The Last Lecture
Author: Randy Pausch
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Cancer
ISBN: 9780340978504

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

What the Best College Teachers Do

What the Best College Teachers Do
Author: Ken Bain
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2011-09-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0674065549

What makes a great teacher great? Who are the professors students remember long after graduation? This book, the conclusion of a fifteen-year study of nearly one hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities, offers valuable answers for all educators. The short answer is—it’s not what teachers do, it’s what they understand. Lesson plans and lecture notes matter less than the special way teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning. Whether historians or physicists, in El Paso or St. Paul, the best teachers know their subjects inside and out—but they also know how to engage and challenge students and to provoke impassioned responses. Most of all, they believe two things fervently: that teaching matters and that students can learn. In stories both humorous and touching, Ken Bain describes examples of ingenuity and compassion, of students’ discoveries of new ideas and the depth of their own potential. What the Best College Teachers Do is a treasure trove of insight and inspiration for first-year teachers and seasoned educators.

The Fall of the Faculty

The Fall of the Faculty
Author: Benjamin Ginsberg
Publisher: OUP USA
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2011-08-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 019978244X

Until very recently, American universities were led mainly by their faculties, which viewed intellectual production and pedagogy as the core missions of higher education. Today, as Benjamin Ginsberg warns in this eye-opening, controversial book, "deanlets"--administrators and staffers often without serious academic backgrounds or experience--are setting the educational agenda.The Fall of the Faculty examines the fallout of rampant administrative blight that now plagues the nation's universities. In the past decade, universities have added layers of administrators and staffers to their payrolls every year even while laying off full-time faculty in increasing numbers--ostensibly because of budget cuts. In a further irony, many of the newly minted--and non-academic--administrators are career managers who downplay the importance of teaching and research, as evidenced by their tireless advocacy for a banal "life skills" curriculum. Consequently, students are denied a more enriching educational experience--one defined by intellectual rigor. Ginsberg also reveals how the legitimate grievances of minority groups and liberal activists, which were traditionally championed by faculty members, have, in the hands of administrators, been reduced to chess pieces in a game of power politics. By embracing initiatives such as affirmative action, the administration gained favor with these groups and legitimized a thinly cloaked gambit to bolster their power over the faculty.As troubling as this trend has become, there are ways to reverse it. The Fall of the Faculty outlines how we can revamp the system so that real educators can regain their voice in curriculum policy.

Profscam

Profscam
Author: Charles J. Sykes
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Total Pages: 332
Release: 1988-10-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780895265593

ProfScam reveals the direct and ultimate reason for the collapse of higher education in the Unites States— the selfish, wayward, and corrupt American university professor.

The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance

The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance
Author: Larry G. Gerber
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2014-09-15
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1421414643

There was a time when the faculty governed universities. Not anymore. The Rise and Decline of Faculty Governance is the first history of shared governance in American higher education. Drawing on archival materials and extensive published sources, Larry G. Gerber shows how the professionalization of college teachers coincided with the rise of the modern university in the late nineteenth century and was the principal justification for granting teachers power in making educational decisions. In the twentieth century, the efforts of these governing faculties were directly responsible for molding American higher education into the finest academic system in the world. In recent decades, however, the growing complexity of “multiversities” and the application of business strategies to manage these institutions threatened the concept of faculty governance. Faculty shifted from being autonomous professionals to being “employees.” The casualization of the academic labor market, Gerber argues, threatens to erode the quality of universities. As more faculty become contingent employees, rather than tenured career professionals enjoying both job security and intellectual autonomy, universities become factories in the knowledge economy. In addition to tracing the evolution of faculty decision making, this historical narrative provides readers with an important perspective on contemporary debates about the best way to manage America’s colleges and universities. Gerber also reflects on whether American colleges and universities will be able to retain their position of global preeminence in an increasingly market-driven environment, given that the system of governance that helped make their success possible has been fundamentally altered.

The Professor Is In

The Professor Is In
Author: Karen Kelsky
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2015-08-04
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0553419420

The definitive career guide for grad students, adjuncts, post-docs and anyone else eager to get tenure or turn their Ph.D. into their ideal job Each year tens of thousands of students will, after years of hard work and enormous amounts of money, earn their Ph.D. And each year only a small percentage of them will land a job that justifies and rewards their investment. For every comfortably tenured professor or well-paid former academic, there are countless underpaid and overworked adjuncts, and many more who simply give up in frustration. Those who do make it share an important asset that separates them from the pack: they have a plan. They understand exactly what they need to do to set themselves up for success. They know what really moves the needle in academic job searches, how to avoid the all-too-common mistakes that sink so many of their peers, and how to decide when to point their Ph.D. toward other, non-academic options. Karen Kelsky has made it her mission to help readers join the select few who get the most out of their Ph.D. As a former tenured professor and department head who oversaw numerous academic job searches, she knows from experience exactly what gets an academic applicant a job. And as the creator of the popular and widely respected advice site The Professor is In, she has helped countless Ph.D.’s turn themselves into stronger applicants and land their dream careers. Now, for the first time ever, Karen has poured all her best advice into a single handy guide that addresses the most important issues facing any Ph.D., including: -When, where, and what to publish -Writing a foolproof grant application -Cultivating references and crafting the perfect CV -Acing the job talk and campus interview -Avoiding the adjunct trap -Making the leap to nonacademic work, when the time is right The Professor Is In addresses all of these issues, and many more.

The Lost Promise

The Lost Promise
Author: Ellen Schrecker
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 632
Release: 2021-12-17
Genre: Education
ISBN: 022620085X

"Ellen Schrecker shows how universities shaped the 1960s, and how the 1960s shaped them. Teach-ins and walkouts-in institutions large and small, across both the country and the political spectrum-were only the first actions that came to redefine universities as hotbeds of unrest for some and handmaidens of oppression for others. The tensions among speech, education, and institutional funding came into focus as never before-and the reverberations remain palpable today"--

Professors in the Gig Economy

Professors in the Gig Economy
Author: Kimberley Tolley
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1421425335

Machine generated contents note: Preface, by Kim Tolley Acknowledgements 1. From Golden Era to Gig Economy, by A.J. Angulo 2. Understanding the Need for Unions, by Adrianna Kezar and Thomas DePaola 3. A Long History of Activism and Organizing, by Timothy R. Cain 4. Union Organizing and the Law, by Gregory Saltzman 5. A Just Employment Approach to Adjunct Unionization, by Joseph McCartin and Nicholas Wertsch 6. Unionizing Adjunct and Tenure-Track Faculty at Notre Dame de Namur, by Kim Tolley, Marianne Delaporte, and Lorenzo Giachetti 7. Unions, Shared Governance, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, by Elizabeth K. Davenport 8. Forming a Union, by Shawn Gilmore 9. Wall to Wall, by Luke Elliot-Negri 10. California State University East Bay, by Kim Geron and Gretchen M. Reevy Conclusion, by Kim Tolley and Kristen Edwards Contributors Appendix Index.