Reviews.indd


Book Reviews 

Burgan, Mary. What Ever Happened to the 
Faculty? Drift and Decision in Higher 
Education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins 
University Press, 2006. 264p. alk. paper, 
$38 (ISBN 0801884616). LC 2006-9630. 

Over the course of her lengthy career in 
higher education, Mary Burgan served 
as General Secretary of the American 
Association of University Professors and 
as English professor, department chair, 
and associate dean at Indiana University-
Bloomington. Her extensive academic and 
administrative background informs this 
insightful examination of the declining 
faculty influence in campus aff airs and, 
more broadly, higher education. In each 
chapter Burgan attempts to summarize 
evenhandedly the trends that have led to 
the current situation, and then proposes 
steps that could lead to solutions. Rather 
than simply blame administrators, legisla-
tors, and public opinion for the faculty’s 
increasingly restricted role in academic 
governance, Burgan shows how the fac-
ulty have often contributed to their loss 
of influence in the act of responding to 
signifi cant challenges. 

Burgan begins her book with a celebra-
tion of the diversity and traditions of 
American higher education and concludes 
it with some case studies that exemplify 
how faculties have responded eff ectively 
to many of the problems dealt with in 
the previous chapters. In the interven-
ing chapters, she discusses pedagogical 
and curricular debates, the challenges of 
intercollegiate athletics, the competition 
among higher education institutions for 
prestige and academic stars, online edu-
cation, governance, tenure, and academic 
freedom. The overriding themes that re-
cur in several chapters and are addressed 
again in the conclusion are: 

a. how competition for research dol-
lars, star faculty, and successful athletic 
programs overwhelm institutional iden-
tities and thus reduce diversity among 

American colleges and uni-
versities; 

b. how the managerial 
culture that is replacing tra-
ditional shared governance 
models is relying on contin-
gent labor (that is, part-time 
non–tenure-track faculty members) to ad-
dress growing enrollments and increase 
institutional flexibility, at the expense of 
institutional continuity; 

c. how the academy is facing a re-
lentless and concerted political eff ort to 
undermine traditional understandings 
of knowledge by elevating the status of 
theoretical challenges based on faith or 
dogma rather than scientific methods of 
inquiry; 

d. why faculty are more unwilling to 
participate in universitywide communal 
activities (such as graduation ceremo-
nies), review and reform curriculum, and 
take the trouble to understand the chang-
ing needs of undergraduate students. 

According to Burgan, among the big-
gest impediments to faculty members re-
engaging in productive governance is their 
exasperation with institutional complexity 
and their fear of wasting valuable time 
either addressing insoluble problems or 
trying to work with administrations that 
are not committed to collaboration. While 
she sympathizes with these faculty fears 
and frustrations, and goes to great lengths 
to explain why such views are oft en justifi-
able, Burgan also argues persuasively that 
the long-term interests of any institution 
are best served when tenured faculty 
members assert their positions fi rmly and 
civilly and reach out to administrators as 
colleagues. Even when such initiatives do 
not find receptive audiences at fi rst, faculty 
regain and retain the moral high ground 
that usually yields dividends as both 
internal and external stakeholders come 
to accept the legitimacy and genuineness 
of the faculty outreach. This should not 

188 



be interpreted as saying Burgan naively 
believes major problems will simply melt 
away when faculty members assert them-
selves, but rather she cogently shows 
why students and the public interest are 
not well served when the faculty are not 
actively involved in governance. 

Burgan is an effective advocate, an 
entertaining writer with a wry sense of 
humor, and an empathetic judge of the 
many players in today’s higher educa-
tion controversies. Her perspectives, 
criticisms, and conclusions are based 
on well-documented research, years of 
experience, and logical arguments that 
challenge and instruct. Aft er reading this 
book, I felt as though I had spent a few 
hours in front of the fireplace of a faculty 
club, ruminating over today’s academy 
with a valued colleague.—W. Bede Mitch-
ell, Georgia Southern University. 

College Libraries and the Teaching/Learn-
ing Process: Selections from the Writ-
ings of Evan Ira Farber. Ed. David 
Gansz, Richard Hume Werking, Lynn 
Scott  Cochrane, and Pyke Jr. Johnson. 
Richmond, Ind.: Earlham College Press, 
2007. 247p. $29 (ISBN 9781117181). 

When the definitive history of the instruc-
tion movement in libraries is written, 
there will be a chapter dedicated to the 
work of Evan Farber at Earlham College. 
Farber played a pivotal role in the devel-
opment and expansion of instructional 
services programs in academic libraries 
during the 1970s and 1980s. Even today, 
almost forty years after its instruction 
program was introduced to a national 
audience at the 1969 annual meeting of 
the American Library Association, Earl-
ham is routinely cited as an example of an 
institution where the contributions made 
by libraries and librarians to undergradu-
ate education are understood and valued. 
Without the work of library leaders like 
Farber, we would not have the vibrant 
and multifaceted instructional services 
programs that we have today, and teach-
ing would not be so widely recognized 
as a core professional responsibility for 

Book Reviews 189 

librarians. For that reason alone, and 
putting aside for the moment the equally 
significant impact that Farber has had on 
the study and practice of college librari-
anship, the field would benefit from an 
exploration of the ongoing significance 
of his ideas. There is a word for this type 
of collection, Festschrift, and Farber and 
his ideas deserve one. Unfortunately, we 
will have to wait for Farber to get his due 
because the current collection is simply a 
compilation of Farber’s writing. Interest-
ing, no doubt, especially to those who 
know him, but not the volume that might 
have engaged a new generation of librar-
ians in a discussion of the promise (and 
limits) of his ideas and of the Earlham 
College Library Instruction Program in 
which they are embodied. 

While this volume collects almost thirty 
discrete articles, essays, and speeches (in-
cluding several pieces never before pub-
lished), the basic theme that runs through 
them all is found in the title—the library 
has a unique and valuable role to play in 
the teaching and learning process that is 
at the heart of undergraduate education. 
In exploring that theme, Farber makes a 
number of points—some of which may 
seem dated to today’s audience, but the 
most significant of which remain germane 
to academic librarianship in the 21st cen-
tury. Keeping in mind that this collection 
provides an overview of thirty years 
of work, one is struck by how many of 
Farber’s ideas—almost all of which were 
implemented in a higher education envi-
ronment yet to be touched by the World 
Wide Web—remain vital. 

Chief among these, perhaps, is the idea 
of the “university-library syndrome,” a 
problem that Farber defined in 1974 as 
“a pattern of attitudes which causes col-
lege faculty, administrators, and librar-
ians to think of their libraries in terms of 
university libraries—and thus to imitate 
their practices, attitudes, and objectives” 
(a pattern noted more broadly in higher 
education as the problem of “institutional 
isomorphism”1). While Farber might not 
have imagined the ways in which college