Unbundling the Faculty Role in Higher Education: Utilizing Historical, Theoretical, and Empirical Frameworks to Inform Future Research

Abstract

What lies in store? One may nourish the hope that from residual and abiding strengths – the human desire to ennoble work, the lingering sense that learnedness is akin to blessedness, the quest for inimitable achievement that goes with strong disciplinary commitments – the academic profession will gather what it needs to preserve itself and remain intact. But this may be a sentimental hope. It may be more realistic to assume that out of the sortings now taking place will emerge two very different entities: a relatively small profession centered in the nonunionized, moderately delocalized, mostly private, research-oriented universities and high grade colleges, and a much larger work force composed of persons called faculty members out of habit but who are in no significant way differentiated from other trained attendants in the teaching enterprise and barely distinguishable from the multitudes engaged in bureaucratized white-collar work – a lumpen professoriate, so to speak. And one may conjure up a future that lacks even this saving remnant: a time when the profession as we know it comes to be regarded by almost everyone as an anomaly, then as a constricting anachronism, and finally as a lifeless relic of a lost and dimly remembered world (Metzger, 1975, p. 41).