Notes on Higher Education in the 1990s

This article consists of a series of essays written for The Academic Workplace, the newsletter of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education, since 1990. The backdrop for the essays is the increasing inequality in higher education caused by changes in the political economy of higher education, especially in New England. The first essay analyzes the roots of contemporary faculty dissatisfaction with their work lives by tracing the impacts of the expansion of higher education, changes in the student body, and greater government involvement in higher education. Subsequent essays discuss multicultural education, faculty shortages, political correctness, responses to cutbacks, the evaluation of quality, and the collective life of academia. Altogether, the essays present a rather grim look at higher education in the 1990s, leavened by a few suggestions for change

Implementing General Education: Initial Findings

The article reports on the first year activities of the Project on the Implementation of General Education. The project, conducted by the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE), is funded by the Exxon Education Foundation. The focus of the research is to examine how general education curricula is actually developed and implemented on college campuses that have limited resources

Assessing Faculty Shortages in Comprehensive Colleges and Universities

In the last two years, the national media and higher education publications have begun warning of faculty shortages. In the fall of 1989 Edward Fiske and Elizabeth Fowler wrote in the New York Times that colleges and universities would be facing major faculty shortages in the humanities and social sciences (Fiske 1989; Fowler 1989). A few months earlier, Joseph Berger (1989) warned in the New York Times that the Slowing Pace to Doctorates Spurs Worry on Filling Jobs. The Chronicle of Higher Education has been running a series of articles on various aspects of the faculty labor market --concerning the extent of anticipated shortages and how colleges and universities are coping with them (Mooney 1989a; Mooney 1989b; Blum 1989), the pros and cons of academic careers ( The Pros and Cons... 1989), and the lost generation of scholars (Heller 1990). These articles present the overall picture, with some attention to differences among the disciplines. None identifies how different types of institutions will experience changes in the supply and demand for faculty. This paper focuses especially on the implications of changes in the faculty labor market for comprehensive universities, four-year primarily undergraduate universities that are neither research universities nor liberal arts colleges (Harcleroad and Ostar 1987; Youn, Finnegan, and Gamson forthcoming). It draws on several national studies to present statistics on anticipated faculty supply and demand for higher education as a whole and then disaggregates these statistics for comprehensive institutions. Next, the paper presents preliminary results from a field study of how several comprehensive universities in New England have been handling faculty recruitment and retention. It concludes with a number of implications of these findings for future institutional responses to changes in the faculty labor market