The Last Professors - by Frank Donoghue (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

"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. With the rise of neoliberalism and the gig economy, the notion of the professoriate has become replaced in our consciousness with the notion of academic labor.

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 the humanities 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 of prestige 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 scholars an essential field guide to making their way in a world that no longer has room for their dreams.

First published in 2008, The Last Professors has largely had its arguments borne out in the interim, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This new edition includes a substantial new Introduction that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough but productive analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.

From the Back Cover

Tenth Anniversary Edition

"People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early. After reading Donoghue's book, I feel that I have timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess."--Stanley Fish, New York Times

"How is it that the number of students attending American universities has surged in recent decades, but the number of professors--especially humanities professors--has dwindled? The perplexing institutional dynamics of the modern university come in for penetrating scrutiny here."--Booklist

"Bristles with striking facts, statistics, data, and citations of expert testimony. . . . A fascinating book."--J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

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.

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 of prestige everywhere, the brutally competitive realities facing new Ph.D.s--that threaten the survival of professors as we've known them.

First published in 2008, The Last Professors has largely had its arguments borne out, as the percentage of courses taught by tenured professors continues to dwindle. This edition includes a substantial new Introduction that elaborates on recent developments and offers tough analysis that will be crucial for today's academics to heed.

Frank Donoghue is Professor of English at the Ohio State University.

Review Quotes

"How is it that the number of students attending American universities has surged in recent decades, but the number of professors--especially humanities professors--has dwindled? The perplexing institutional dynamics of the modern university come in for penetrating scrutiny here. Donoghue, an Ohio State English professor, sees a troubling new conception of higher education emerging among administrators whose thinking reflects the bottom-line calculations of business executives, not the intellectual ideals of liberal arts scholars. Inclined to view traditional professors as a costly anachronism, such administrators have been hiring low-pay adjunct instructors to replace them--and restricting their educational task to that of teaching employment skills. Even in the elite Ivy League, the humanities professors now must justify their work as a way of enhancing a school's marketable prestige. Beleaguered professors face a dire situation in burgeoning state universities, where institutional accountants assess their research using simplistic ranking systems akin to those applied to football teams. A sobering analysis, sure to attract serious readers on and off campus."-- "Booklist"

"Bristles with striking facts, statistics, data, and citations of expert testimony. . . . A fascinating book."---J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

"People sometimes believe that they were born too late or too early. After reading Donoghue's book, I feel that I have timed it just right, for it seems that I have had a career that would not have been available to me had I entered the world 50 years later. Just lucky, I guess."---Stanley Fish, New York Times

About the Author

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