The Chronicle of Higher Education
July 28th, 2014
Professors, administrators, and professional staff members can probably agree on one thing when it comes to the academic workplace—the times, they keep a-changin’.
Over the next several years, at least, new technologies are expected to drastically reshape the way professors teach, and when and where people on college campuses do their work. As lawmakers, parents, and students continue to question whether a college degree is worth it, and as higher education struggles to reinvent itself, professors are sure to face more scrutiny about their workloads. Those trends have set the stage for internal battles over administrators’ renewed attempts to measure faculty productivity.
Dedicated office space on campus may not always be a given in the workplace of the future, even for some tenured and tenure-track professors. But more colleges are expected to create family-friendly workplaces, as the next generation of faculty members signals how much it values work-life balance. That is increasingly true for both male and female academics.