The Chronicle of Higher Education
Date: February 2, 1996
Section: Personal & Professional
Page: A17
By Denise K. Magner
Critics have long complained that the professoriate is dominated by white males, but a study now shows that a new generation of professors is markedly changing the face of academe.
Compared to their senior colleagues, these faculty members are much more likely to be women and somewhat more likely to be members of minority groups. But they are less likely to be U.S.-born citizens, to hold tenure-track jobs, or to teach in traditional arts-and-sciences fields.
The new generation -- defined in the study as full-time faculty members in the first seven years of their academic careers -- is no mere statistical blip. Fully a third of the country's full-time professoriate belongs to this new group, the study shows, contradicting the widespread perception that a weak academic job market has prevented a significant infusion of new blood.
"They snuck up on us," says Martin J. Finkelstein, one of the three authors of a preliminary report of the study released last month, called "The American Faculty in Transition: A First Look at the New Academic Generation." Mr. Finkelstein is director of the New Jersey Institute for Collegiate Teaching and Learning at Seton Hall University.
The study is based on data collected in a fall-1992 faculty survey sponsored by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. That survey of 31,354 faculty members provides a detailed demographic picture of the American professoriate. The national center has commissioned eight different analyses of the survey data, including the new report on junior-faculty members.
Of the 482,963 full-time faculty members employed in teaching positions, the report says, 161,332 were in the first seven years of their careers, having been hired from 1986 to 1992.
"The new cohort of faculty is considerably larger than most people would have thought," says Jack H. Schuster, one of the report's authors and a professor of education at the Claremont Graduate School. "The sheer size of it strongly suggests that these new faculty members will exert a very considerable influence on the academic profession."
According to the report, about 45 per cent of the new faculty members have been hired at research and doctoral institutions, 24 per cent at master's universities, 19 per cent at two-year colleges, 8 per cent at liberal-arts colleges, and the rest at other institutions.
"We think we're looking at a third post-World War II generation of faculty," Mr. Schuster says. The first generation was hired in the 1950s and '60s, as higher education expanded rapidly. The second generation includes those hired in the 1970s and early '80s, when the hiring rate slowed and colleges became more "market-oriented," he says.
The demographic profile of the third generation is "strikingly different," he says. Combining data on gender, race, and citizenship, "we find that only 43 per cent of the new faculty cohort are native-born white males, compared to 59 per cent of the senior cohort."
The study's findings on citizenship are especially significant, given recent concerns about the academic job market.
Some critics have, in part, attributed the weak job market in the sciences to the increased hiring of foreign scientists by U.S. institutions. (Because it is based on 1992 data -- the most recent available -- the study does not reflect any downturn in the academic job market since then, Mr. Schuster notes.) The study found that about a quarter of the new- generation scholars were not born in the United States -- compared to less than 16 per cent of their senior colleagues -- and that the increase was due largely to a shift in the natural sciences. Only about 75 per cent of the junior scientists were born in the United States, compared to 86 per cent of the senior faculty members. Mr. Schuster cautions that the data do not show how recently the non-native-born professors came to the United States.
The study's findings about women are both encouraging and disappointing, Mr. Schuster says.
Women make up almost 41 per cent of the new-faculty generation, compared to about 28 per cent of the senior faculty. Newly hired women outnumber newly hired men at both liberal-arts and community colleges, but only a third of the new hires at doctoral institutions are women. Still, their presence at research universities has made a big difference, the report says. Just over 46 per cent of all full-time female academics at research institutions have been in academe for seven years or less.
Within the new generation of faculty members, 44 per cent of the women have a master's as their highest degree and 41 per cent have doctorates. Among the newly hired men, however, 59 per cent have doctorates.
The senior professors are much more likely to be tenured than new-generation faculty members. But the study shows that a third of the junior academics are not even in positions where they are eligible for tenure, compared to 15.8 per cent of the senior faculty.
The disparity is more pronounced for women. Both at the junior and senior levels, women are "far more likely to be employed in non-tenure track positions than males," the report says. And while nearly 28 per cent of the newly hired men already hold tenure, only 16 per cent of the newly hired women do.
More minority professors are found in the new generation than among senior faculty members. Nearly 17 per cent of the newly hired academics are minority scholars, compared to 11 per cent of the senior professors. The biggest gains have been made by Asian Americans, especially men.
"The new generation is diversifying along gender lines, but is not diversifying quite as quickly along ethnic lines," says Robert K. Seal, the report's third author and assistant dean of the faculty at the Stevens Institute of Technology.
Whatever their gender and ethnicity, the new faculty members are taking longer to land full-time faculty appointments than their mentors did, the report says. "New career entrants," it says, are "roughly twice as likely to have worked in an employment sector outside postsecondary education" as their predecessors.
The new faculty generation may be demographically different, Mr. Finkelstein says. But when it comes to their professional priorities and how they do their work, the survey data show that "the new people are doing the same damn thing as the old people," he says.
"Seven out of 10 are relying on lecturing like the old faculty. They're not doing much different instructionally in the classroom." This "raises a lot of alarm bells," he says, given that these new academics have come in at a time when the importance of teaching and the need to avoid relying on lecturing have been major issues.
Members of the new generation report spending 51 per cent of their time teaching, 23 per cent on research, and the rest on other duties. They would like to shift more hours away from teaching to research, according to the study. Mr. Finkelstein says it is unclear whether these academics are simply reacting to the publish-or-perish world in which they work, or have been socialized by their mentors to favor research.
A preliminary version of "The American Faculty in Transition" must go through a review process at the National Center for Education Statistics before a final version is released this year.