The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities » (1st Edition)

Frank Donoghue is Associate Professor of English at the Ohio State University. He is the author of The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers.

'What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?' asked Columbia's Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. 'There is more and more reason to think: less and less,' he answered.In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor.Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure tracks, and signs point to a future where professors will disappear. Why? What will universities look like without professors? Who will teach? Why should it matter? The fate of the professor, Donoghue shows, has always been tied to that of the liberal arts —with thehumanities at its core. The rise to prominence of the American university has been defined by the strength of the humanities and by the central role of the autonomous, tenured professor who can be both scholar and teacher. Yet in today's market-driven, rank- and ratings-obsessed world of higher education, corporate logic prevails: faculties are to be managed for optimal efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage; casual armies of adjuncts and graduate students now fill the demand for teachers.Bypassing the distractions of the culture wars and other 'crises,' Donoghue sheds light on the structural changes in higher education—the rise of community colleges and for-profit universities, the frenzied pursuit ofprestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s —that threaten the survival of professors as we've known them. There are no quick fixes in The Last Professors; rather, Donoghue offers his fellow teachers and scholarsan essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

Elizabeth R. Hayford - Library Journal

Donoghue (English, Ohio State Univ.; The Fame Machine: Book Reviewing and Eighteenth-Century Literary Careers) provides a rapid overview of the influences shaping and, he believes, weakening, contemporary U.S. higher education. Ever since the end of the 19th century, the American preference for corporate efficiency has undermined the core liberal arts curriculum, leading to the emergence of for-profit colleges and universities that emphasize career preparation and have no time for the humanities. Combined with a shrinking and increasingly competitive job market for PhD candidates, this environment threatens the autonomous academic life that allows tenured professors to pursue their intellectual interests and combine teaching with scholarship. In lively prose, Donoghue draws together a wide range of perspectives, asserting that higher education, especially general education and the humanities, offers important values for American society. He urges his colleagues to become more active in defending a richer mode of education and to make themselves better informed about the factors now shaping colleges and universities. This book raises important issues in a zealous tone and is recommended for any library on-or near-a college campus.

1 Rhetoric, History, and the Problems of the Humanities 1

2 Competing in Academia 24

3 The Erosion of Tenure 55

4 Professors of the Future 83

5 Prestige and Prestige Envy 111

Notes 139

Bibliography 161

Index 171