Academic Cultures

For better or for worse, the goal of securing tenure-track assistant professorships frames the graduate school experience for most students. Yet what the graduate experience boasts in scholarly training it lacks in institutional training--that is, in guiding future faculty members to see and experience positively the wide variety of prospective professional identities rooted in assorted academic cultures. Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life gives voice to diversity in postsecondary education, a strength of the system rather than a problem to redress. Contributors, whether they work at a private high school or a public comprehensive university, an open-access institution or a religiously affiliated college, disclose to readers the details and outcomes of their cross-sector transitions. Their accounts show how faculty members from a range of institutions have built rewarding professional lives based on the traditional components of the professoriat--teaching, service, and scholarship.