The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities

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.