Career Disruption in Higher Education.
Some of the least anticipated and least publicized casualties of today's tight job market-displaced college faculty-are described by one writer as "destined to a life of wandering in search of a campus that will have them and keep them" [14, p. 35]. They have doctoral degrees but are unemployed, underemployed, or employed only until they reach the point of tenure and promotion. The problem of displaced college faculty is not new, but it is newly acknowledged and has been growing in volume and impact since the early 1970s. There is a growing number of displaced and frequently disillusioned former professors (or prospective professors) looking for jobs and poorly prepared to cope with this unexpected career disruption. This article attempts to shed some light on how individuals who have lost, who are losing, or who have never secured the anticipated academic position cope with what is, at worst, a crisis and, at best, an unanticipated need to restructure their lives. The crisis in higher education is the result of three, somewhat unrelated, sets of circumstances that have combined to create an academic recession: (1) a decrease in the number of college-age young people, (2) an overproduction of doctorates, and (3) an inflated economy that drove up the costs of education while an economic recession put limitations on passing costs on to the consumer.