Teachers' In-Service Career Patterns.
Abstract Schoolteaching is not a consensual profession with a single culture, but one segmented by different interest groups. An important dimension of the culture of these professional segments is their commitment to either a restricted or an extended professionality. Teachers’ relations to professionality can be clarified from their theory and practice of in‐service education and from the type of in‐service career upon which they embark. The form taken by teachers’ continuing education, the way teachers rank different types of in‐service course, how experience of in‐service education touches the professional work of schools ‐ these are factors that pattern teachers’ in‐service careers. Using data about teachers’ practices in these three areas, five career patterns are identified and a group of teachers representing each career pattern is selected. The teachers are described in terms of personal biographical and work characteristics. Their opinions about what makes in‐service education attractive to them...
Institutional Office and the Person
Conscious fulfilling of formally defined offices distinguishes institutions from elementary collective behavior. In office, personal role and social status meet. In some offices, ritual is dominant; in others, judgment and enterprise are called for. A career is the person's sequence of role and realized status and office. In rigid societies, careers are of standard type; and each person's is somewhat predetermined. In a freer society, they are less so; but nevertheless, types of careers appear. The institutions of a society may not be understood without understanding offices and careers.
The New ‘U’
Today's talk about tenure must be framed within broader discussions about the role of the university. Our university system is now over one hundred years old, the “Old-Time College” is gone, the “cold war” university is no longer viable, and the foundations of the modern “multiversity” are cracking, so it is time to talk about change. But change is not necessarily reform, and resisting change probably will not keep things the way they are, so academics must understand the forces reshaping the university. Whenever I listen to colleagues defend the status quo by saying that the United States has a university system that is the envy of the world, I hear echoes of the Detroit automobile industry's casual dismissal of foreign competitors in the early 1960s. The decision not to change did not preserve the auto industry, and it is unlikely to preserve public universities as we know them. The current debates about tenure began with ideological attacks on “tenured radicals” who used their secure jobs to subvert conservative cultural values. The attack on tenure gathered steam as fiscal hawks in financially-strapped states looked for ways to save money and found huge state university systems with budgets to match. When asked why he robbed banks, the legendary Willie Sutton replied, “Because that's where the money is.” When asked why they are robbing tenure, legislators, regents, and administrators reply, “Because that's where the money is.” Personnel costs are a large share of university budgets and tenure ties the hands of administrators and legislators accustomed to using purse strings to control universities.