Leonard Cassuto: Faculty Immobility in the New Economy
...Unlike baseball players, professors did not gain the right to become free agents at a specific moment. The change occurred over time, and resulted above all from the 20th-century growth of the American academic enterprise. In 1900 only about 2 percent of Americans attended college, and only 1 percent held a college degree. But education at all levels expanded rapidly in the United States in the early 20th century. About one-fifth of all people born in 1940 would go on to finish four years of college, a twentyfold increase.
Tenure insinuated itself gradually into higher education beginning in the 1920s. But the "publish or perish" ultimatum was still far away, as were thick tenure dossiers and outside referees. Instead, the tenure decision lay with a young professor's direct supervisors. Autocratic department chairmen (and I use the male pronoun advisedly) were the rule rather than the exception, and they could often make tenure decisions by themselves. If a department chairman liked a young scholar's work (or appreciated his attitude), he could make certain that his protégé received tenure regardless of publication record. If not, the chairman could deny promotion.
The academy was parochial by today's standards, and remained so until the 1960s, but it also created loyalty. Stanley N. Katz, the Princeton University historian and recent recipient of the National Humanities Medal, once described, in these pages, the faculty then as "a small but fairly coherent group of scholars trained at a few leading universities, committed both to one another and to the institutions in which they taught." Professors expected that they would teach at the same university for their entire careers, and most did. They also taught a lot more. Anthony Grafton, now at Princeton and the current president of the American Historical Association, was at Cornell University in the early 1970s. Senior faculty in the history department, he recently recalled in an interview with me, then taught a heavier course load than their junior colleagues, to aid the career development of younger faculty. In the early 1960s, professors at the College of William & Mary routinely taught five courses a semester, a load we now encounter primarily at community colleges. A survey conducted in 1970 found that barely 3 percent of the nation's English departments taught the light loads we see at most research universities today (a 3/2 load or less a year)....