The Academic Profession in Transition: Toward a New Social Fiction

Abstract

This paper examines the working lives of faculty and describes what it means to be an academic professional in a context that is being profoundly altered. During the period of rapid expansion in American higher education (ca. 1956-1974), a normative conception of the academic profession became dominant. Although there have been significant changes in the conditions under which the majority offaculty work, the socialfiction that defines success in the profession remains intact and largely unexamined. This paper presents the several components of the assumptive world of the academic professional and examines the implications of each component for the changing context in which faculty work. Elements that might be included in a more appropriate, multidimensional conception of the profession are set forth.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 70 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.