Over the past several years my colleagues and I have been engaged in a detailed examination of trends in faculty work and careers. Our efforts, described subsequently, have not focused on the effects of these developments on student learning. But as our research has evolved, it has become apparent that some of the most important changes that we are detailing, especially the dramatic reconfiguration of faculty appointments in recent years, have very important implications for students and the teachinglearning process.A dash of recent history will provide a context for the subsequent argument. The heightened interest in student learning outcomes has no clearly identifiable starting point. There was no flipping of a switch that raised consciousness levels, either inside or outside the academy, about the importance of trying to use actual outcomes rather than to rely on the usual array of inputs as surrogates for effective education. But it is clear that the momentum toward emphasizing student outcomes sharply increased in the 1980s, prompted especially by persistent critics, often public officials, and also by insistent academic voices that urged a laser-like focus on actual learning. Although in the discourse that ensued the pivotal role of the faculty-their training, the reward structure, and so on-was recognized, one crucial aspect of the "faculty factor" has received far too little attention: namely, the potential effects on student learning of the redeployment of the faculty in different types of appointments.This chapter is based on a presentation made at the annual meeting of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, Seattle, January 25, 2003.
This research links two important higher education phenomena: potential "brain drain" among academics abroad and the U.S. academic labor market. The inquiry draws on the "brain drain" literature and is grounded primarily on a secondary analysis of a major survey (1989) of British university and polytechnic faculty members. The anlaysis shows that fully 40.0 percent of university faculty are "seriously considering" a move abroad with the substantial majority favoring the United States as a destination. Faculty characteristics -including academic field, research versus teaching orientation, rank, age, gender, and political identification -are correlated with faculty members' professed interest in emigration. The analysis also compares (former) polytechnic to university faculty as well as to a subset of Oxford and Cambridge faculty.
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