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This study takes the position that the vitality of academic libraries is grounded in the working experiences of its librarians. It suggests that a full understanding of problems facing contemporary information professionals in the post-industrial workplace requires an analysis of the labouring aspects as well as the professional nature of their work. The study of changes in the academic library work experience thus depicts the state of the library, and has implications for other intellectual workers in a social environment characterized by expanding information technologies, constricted economic resources, and the globalization of information production. Academic librarians have long recognized that their vocation lies not only in the classical role in information collection, organization, and dissemination, but also in collaboration with faculty in the teaching and research process, and in the contribution to university governance. They are becoming increasingly active in the protection of information access and assurance of information quality in view of information degradation on the Internet and various compromises necessitated by interaction with third party commercial information producers.

The institution of tenure has elicited debate and controversy since its introduction in higher education. Proponents argue the need for tenure based on academic freedom and efficient university governance. Critics argue that it represents inefficiency in the higher education labor market and protects less productive faculty members. The use of tenure in academic libraries has been no less controversial, with only 40−60% of academic libraries supporting tenure track positions for academic librarians. This dichotomy in the labor market for academic librarians represents a natural experiment and allows for the testing of the presence of a compensating wage differential for tenure.

This study examines 10 years’ worth of cross-sectional data drawn from member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Models examine both the institutional characteristics of tenure-granting ARL academic libraries and the impact of tenure on starting salaries. Issues related to both a union wage premium and a compensating wage differential due to tenure are explored. The results of this research suggest that tenure, while serving other functions within an academic library setting, does not have the predicted impact on starting salaries.

This essay offers a subjective literary exploration of personal events relevant to understanding an assault on academic freedom in a two-year college. The critically qualitative inquiry focuses on two events: (a) the questioning by faculty of dual credit policies and (b) an administratively engineered disciplinary action that functioned to have a chilling effect on free speech and to, thereby, quell academic freedom. The dual credit story comes in the form of an embedded narrative essay previously published as a Facebook note. That embedded essay presents the tale of the author and a colleague, the advisor for their community college newspaper, exercising their academic freedom to critically engage a community college administration’s violations of Illinois State dual credit laws. The embedded essay serves also to reveal an administrative response to the professors’ decision to report the violation of state law to the Higher Learning Commission and the Illinois Community College Board. Following that, the essay provides a qualitative examination of the administrative response and explains how the response served to quell academic freedom.

As the chapters in this book thus far have outlined, profound changes have occurred to the higher education landscape that have impacted significantly on what academics do and how they position themselves and their intellectual work. As this chapter will illustrate, these changes are acutely visible in the intensified scrutiny of research outputs, performance and publishing, the rating of universities through ranking exercises, and the flows of knowledge through a mobile academic labour market. These are the rapid and relentless calculative technologies (Douglas, 1987; Shore & Wright, 2000) that frame the research environment. Significantly, ways in which individuals and universities have responded to these demands and the pursuit of status have ritualised academic work and the academy.

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was invited to address members of the London and National Society for Women's Service about the employment of women. As a well-known literary figure as well as a woman intellectual, Woolf mused on her own biography and the risks she had to take to establish her own career. She used the metaphor of a room of one's own to underscore the challenges women faced to have a degree of freedom to shape their professional lives:You have won rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men, You are able, though not without great labour and effort to pay the rent … But this freedom is only a beginning; the room is your own, but it is still bare. (Woolf, 1974, chapter 27)

Similar to community colleges in the United States, the Israeli tertiary system includes two-year technological colleges, which provide students with a labor-market relevant qualification. Nonetheless, unlike the community colleges, the technological colleges are not considered to be part of the higher education system and their transfer function is irregular and confined. In order to understand these differences, the chapter has two complementary objectives: (a) to describe the emergence and development of technological colleges and (b) to evaluate the implications for social inequality in access to higher education in Israel. We use a mixed-methods research design, including analyzing primary and secondary sources describing the official policy and public discourse around these colleges (qualitative/historical research) and comparing students attending academic institutions to students attending technological colleges and students across different fields of study offered by these colleges (quantitative research). Drawing on Phillip's (2004) model for policy attraction in education, we find that technological colleges in Israel were based on the Dutch HTS model, while the founding of these colleges was initiated by local impulse. The implementation of the technological colleges in the Israeli context was shaped by a cultural logic for higher education that emphasizes research and knowledge production, creating a binary tertiary system. Drawing on sociological literature on diversification and stratification in tertiary education, we find that technological colleges attract more students from disadvantaged groups and more students with relatively low academic ability than academic institutions. In addition, within technological colleges, students from advantaged background and higher academic ability are more likely to study in more prestigious fields of study. These findings suggest that if policy makers in Israel aspire to increase access to higher education, they should rethink policy instruments and cultivate the transfer function of technological colleges. This is among the first studies to examine technological colleges in Israel and we conclude with different directions for further research.

We use panel data models to examine variations and changes in faculty employment at four-year colleges and universities in the United States. The share of part-time faculty among total faculty has continued to grow during the last two decades, while the share of full-time lecturers and instructors has been relatively stable. Meanwhile, the share of nontenure track faculty among full-time faculty has been growing, especially among the professorial ranks. Dynamic panel data models suggest that employment levels of different types of faculty respond to a variety of economic and institutional factors. Colleges and universities have increasingly employed faculty whose salaries and benefits are relatively inexpensive; the slowly deteriorating financial situations at most colleges and universities have led to an increasing reliance on a contingent academic workforce. A cross-sectional comparison of the share of full-time nontenure track faculty also reveals significant variations across institutions.