In attempting to place these current developments in their proper historical context, I recognize that the future always resists prediction. The literature of American higher education is replete with predictions that failed to materialize. Particularly notable is the fact that many of those unrealized forecasts were authored by (otherwise) well-regarded, very wise observers. Moreover, in an era of accelerated societal change on a global scale, attempts to predict the future are surely all the more hazardous, if not plain foolhardy. So, although I undertake the task of interpreting the historical evolution of higher education in the U.S. with some confidence, I have no illusion that the future will evolve according to my whims. With that caveat established, let me attempt to connect higher education's fascinating past to several current developments and conclude with a few comments about the elusive future.

The patterns of immigration to the U.S. are in constant flux. In recent decades, the tilt has been toward Asia, or, more precisely, toward the U.S. from Asia. There are various ways to measure the change in the immigration patterns of scholars who obtain faculty positions in the U.S. A recent study provides one lens through which to view this shift (Finkelstein, Seal & Schuster, 1998).8This study contrasted the characteristics of a relatively new cohort of faculty members (whom we defined as having had seven or fewer years of full-time employment as faculty members) with the characteristics of their more senior colleagues (those with eight or more years of full-time academic employment). Two findings are relevant for present purposes.

First, increasing numbers of non-U.S. natives are becoming faculty members. That is, the proportion of full-time faculty members who are native-born U.S. citizens appears to be shrinking significantly: 83.1 percent among the newer cohort in contrast to 88.5 percent among the more senior cohort. 9 Put another way, only about one in nine experienced faculty members had moved to the U.S. from elsewhere compared to about one in six among the newer entrants to full-time academic work.

Second, a clear difference is evident in comparing these non-natives' countries of origin. In both the senior and newer cohorts of faculty, India is the country of birth that heads the list, and in both cohorts natives of India are followed by natives of the United Kingdom. The gap now appears to be widening. In the newer cohort of faculty, natives of India outnumber those from the U.K. by 15 percent (3,633 vs. 3,158), whereas the difference within the more senior cohort had been negligible (4,674 vs. 4,457) (Finkelstein, Seal & Schuster, 1998). 10 More strikingly, in the new cohort natives of China (2,736) approach in number those who were U.K.-born (3,158).

In all, the influx of scholars from Asia, particularly East Asia, has risen steeply in recent years both in absolute and relative terms. The steady stream of academic talent continues, lured by academic jobs and, often, attracted in particular by the prospect of research support that may be very difficult or nearly impossible to obtain in one's native land. This process continues, stimulated by favorable immigration policy -especially by the far-reaching U.S. Immigration Act of 1990- despite the prevailing very tight academic labor market in the U.S. in most academic fields. (It must be added that these immigration policies -perhaps like all national policies- serve the perceived national interest of the importing nation with minimal regard for the resulting drain of talent away from the exporters of academic talent.) (Schuster, 1994).

In sum, internationalization has become an increasingly prominent dimension of the American academic landscape, further extending the long history of immigration that is inseparable from the story of American higher education. This feature continues to enrich American higher education, even though revolutionary technologies of communication render national boundaries less and less relevant to the work of academicians. The history of internationalization is a story of sustained progression.

When Christopher Jencks and David Riesman wrote The Academic Revolution in 1968, it could be interpreted as a celebration of how the academic profession had succeeded in its long struggle to achieve professionalism (Jenks & Riesman, 1968). This accomplishment was evidenced, they argued, by academics having finally achieved the dominant influence over core academic activities, particularly, academic personnel decisions, curricular decisions, and other issues of academic quality.

But at about the time that this figurative celebration of victory was taking place, important changes -the regression to which I refer- were already beginning to take place, not so visibly at first but gaining momentum in the 1980s and especially accelerating in the 1990s. Most notable are two parallel developments that taken together erode -even reverse- the prior progress. First, the proportion of faculty members who teach only part-time has been rising at a dramatic rate for three decades. In the early 1970s, about 22 percent of faculty members (by headcount) were teaching part-time. By the early 1980s, the proportion had risen steadily to about 32 percent, then to 42 percent in 1992. The percentage appears to have climbed throughout the past decade, and as the new decade begins, the proportion of part-time faculty appears to be approaching 50 percent (Schuster, 1998). This relentless increase in the proportion of part-time faculty constitutes a huge change in the way higher education is being conducted in the U.S. And although the use of part-time faculty is more extensive among the two-year community colleges, the practice has accelerated in all types of institutions (Gappa & Leslie, 1993).

The experience in many other nations, including Mexico, is very different from that in the U.S. In Mexico, among other settings, very heavy reliance on less than full-time faculty members has long been the norm. But in the U.S. this massive shift toward a contingent academic workforce constitutes a highly troubling setback in the eyes of many critics.

A second trend that has almost escaped detection is profoundly important and is also disturbing to many observers. This is the extent to which the appointments of full-time faculty members are being made that depart from traditional practice. The traditional type of appointment for full-time faculty members is initially for a probationary period (customarily six or seven years) followed by a decision -"up or out"- that would result either in conferring tenure or prescribing a terminal year that ordinarily would be used by the unsuccessful candidate for tenure to seek and obtain another academic position. But something very different has been happening, namely, appointing full-time faculty members for limited term appointments, that is, appointments off the tenure track. This is a quite recent development. There have always been some full-time faculty members who have not held tenure-eligible appointments, but those numbers, until very recently, have been small. In fact, national surveys of faculty members in the 1960s and 1970s indicate that the numbers of such appointments were negligible. Full-time status essentially was tantamount either to having tenure or a probationary appointment leading to a tenure decision. That has all changed. In fact, my colleagues and I have found that during the 1990s, slightly over one half of all new full-time academic appointments have been tenure-ineligible term appointments (IPEDS, 1993, 1995, 1997). That is revolutionary or, more properly described, a reversion to an era that predates the profession's achievement of tenure as a normative practice. Some observers, myself included, view this trend as regressive, a reversal of an historical evolution that was pivotal in securing crucial professional autonomy and appropriate faculty influence over academic affairs.

Thus, given the sharp escalation in the number and proportion of part-time faculty appointments combined with the rapid increase in the number and proportion of full-time faculty appointees who are tenure ineligible, the American faculty is being reconfigured at an amazing rate. Among faculty appointments made in recent years, perhaps only one in four is a traditional tenure-bearing or tenure-eligible appointment (Schuster, 1998).

The principal reasons for these developments are not difficult to ascertain: cost containment and organizational flexibility. The part-time appointments save a lot of money; for those appointees earn much less than their full-time counterparts measured on a per-course basis. And such appointments, almost always for one academic term or one year, provide the institution with maximum flexibility -an increasingly attractive feature in a volatile, uncertain environment. The full-time term appointments also add attractive flexibility for deploying instructional and research staff. That much is undeniable.

There is another dimension to this phenomenon. The full-time faculty in the U.S. is older than ever. The most recent national survey places their average age at 51 (National Opinion Research Center, 2000). Accordingly, a great many retirements are beginning to take place and, correspondingly, a great many replacements are being -and will be- made in the near future. The point here is that the transformation of the faculty, in terms of the kinds of appointments they hold, will likely accelerate with so many faculty members holding traditional-type appointments being replaced by new entrants who are much more likely to hold non-tenure track appointments.

What difference does this make? If these trends result in significant cost savings and expanded organizational flexibility, why be concerned? An adequate response would require more attention than the scope of this paper allows, but much of the answer must be grounded in historical experience. My reading of that history is that the academy would be unable adequately to perform its vital function as an independent critic of society, including its ability to criticize the academy itself, without the stability and protection that full-time, secure academic appointments provide. Moreover, an increasingly contingent faculty has enormous-and troubling implications-for academic culture and practice, including diminished faculty accessibility to students.

In all, the powerful trends now underway in redeploying the faculty constitute a reversion to a more problematic era for the academic profession and for core academic values.

The colonial colleges in America were neither distinctly "public" nor "private" institutions in contemporary terms. In this regard, their identity was blurred. Thus Harvard and Yale and Dartmouth and their institutional "siblings" were chartered by local governments-typically by the governor who was the British Crown's agent in the various colonies. And all of these fledgling colleges received some amount of public financial subsidy (Cremin, 1970; Rudolph, 1962). (Harvard, for example, received an annual allocation from the General Court (essentially the colony's legislature). But these early colleges were far from being "pure" public entities. Thus, they were typically beholden to whichever Protestant denomination that had helped to found and support them and, moreover, the colleges controlled their own admissions, hired their small staffs, and so on. "The distinctions," observed Cremin, "were in process of becoming and therefore [were] unclear and inconsistent"(Cremin, 1970). Marsden described these early colleges as "quasi-public" (Marsden, 1994, p. 68). This condition of fuzziness between public and private identities or auspices changed in the early Nineteenth Century in large part as a result of the so-called Dartmouth College Case which was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1819.

The state legislature of New Hampshire (for by then the colonies had become states in the still-young Union) was unhappy with Dartmouth College's unresponsiveness to the needs of the state's citizens which the legislators believed to be much more pragmatic than the College's classical curriculum with religious content was providing. To remedy the situation, the legislature attempted to reorder the College's priorities (Rudolph, 1962, pp. 207-213). But wait! Dartmouth College, which had been established in 1769, had its own governing board, dating from its original charter, and was keen to resist the attempted takeover by State authorities. To condense a long, complex story, the College sued the State and prevailed. Writing the Court's opinion, John Marshall -the first (and long serving) Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court- concluded that Dartmouth College was not a public institution subject to public control and that the State could not abrogate the College's contractual rights, which derived from its charter (Rudolph, 1962, p. 210). In other words, if the New Hampshire legislature wanted to control how higher education was to be conducted, it would have to pursue other means such as creating its own college.11

This decision by the U.S. Supreme Court served as a stimulus in two basic ways. It signaled to the colleges that were scattered among the states and regarded themselves as private that they were protected against attempts by state authorities to convert such private colleges (or private entities of whatever kind) to their own purposes. There was room left for some measure of public oversight of the colleges, but converting a private college into a public one by displacing its governing board, Marshall concluded, would violate the U.S. Constitution. At the same time that the Court assured Dartmouth College of its independence, a correlative effect of that decision was to establish that any state that desired to mould higher education to that state's own priorities would need to establish its own public college. And this the legislators of New Hampshire eventually did, albeit almost five decades later. Indeed, the Supreme Court's decision, by endorsing the autonomy of private colleges, appears initially to have retarded the development of unambiguously public colleges. Prior to the Dartmouth decision, several states had created their own public colleges. (Both North Carolina and Georgia vie for the title of being first around 1785). But after the Dartmouth decision, the distinction between public and private colleges (and, later, "universities") became increasingly clear, and ultimately the states seriously undertook the task of creating and nurturing public colleges and universities.

This public-private distinction has lead to a remarkable system of American higher education, so remarkably diverse and radically decentralized, as noted earlier, that it might well be described as a non-system. Whether it is a "system" or "non-system," when considered on this more macro scale, it is amazing to me how these parallel public and private (or "independent") sectors have evolved, over so many years, with neither dominating the other.12 This dimension of American higher education is distinctive -indeed, unique in some respects-when considered from a global perspective. True, in recent decades some other nations have encouraged the private sector's rise to greater prominence -Japan and, more recently, Mexico are among the scattered examples- but the U.S. set in motion long ago its centrifugal approach, featuring a very limited role for central government. Indeed, the federal government did not establish its own cabinet-level (or ministry-level) agency for education until 1980 when the U.S. Department of Education was created by the slimmest of Congressional margins (in 1979) (Radin & Hawley, 1988). Indeed, the newborn Department came perilously close to extermination in its infancy when Ronald Reagan, who, as candidate for president had campaigned against this new federal department, after his election sought, but could not obtain, sufficient Congressional support to destroy it (Schuster, 1982).

The higher education landscape thus has featured these robust side-by-side public and private sectors. It is remarkable that the most prominent universities continue to be divided, roughly equally, between those two sectors. Indeed, the rankings of universities -however useful or irrelevant such rankings may be deemed to be- have not changed substantially throughout the past century, from the Carnegie Foundation's rankings in 1909 (Slosson, 1910) to the latter-day reputational rankings generated by the American Council on Education and the National Research Council. Most interestingly, this outcome is not by design but by happenstance, a kind of historical fluke. And, although public higher education has expanded enormously during the past half century to now account for roughly four fifths of all enrollments in higher education, the independent sector, at least among the more selective (elite) universities and colleges, has maintained, if not increased, its prominence.

If "parallel non-systems" is a fair way to characterize what we have fashioned in the U.S., it is relevant to note that the boundaries of the two sectors are now becoming more blurred than ever, at least since the Dartmouth College Case in effect delineated private from public higher education almost two centuries ago, as discussed earlier. In recent decades, for many reasons, the overlap between the public and private sectors has become more evident. Consider these developments. Public institutions at all levels now engage very actively in fundraising from private sources that formerly "belonged" to the independent sector. Twenty-five or thirty years ago, substantial fundraising by the leading public universities was very uncommon. However, as public funding for higher education became more elusive, that historical condition changed rapidly. It is no doubt shocking to some observers that some eminent public universities today receive less than one quarter, or even less than one fifth, of their overall revenues from the very state that created and claim them. Thus these ostensibly public institutions, while not having changed their legal status, are necessarily responsive to many masters. To be sure, much of the support they receive for research comes from public sources at the national level, that is, federal agencies, prominent among them the National Institutes of Health land the National Science Foundation; the typically sponsor much of the research, especially big science projects, conducted at the research universities. The state may stand in primus inter pares, among the other supporters, but the big public research universities -the University of Michigan or the University of California, Berkeley, among dozens of others- are less and less dependent on, and thereby less driven by a state-generated agenda. This is not to argue that the great state universities have been substantially privatized, although corporate sponsors and individual donors have their priorities. It is to say that the great state universities today negotiate a much more complex environment in which influence comes form many quarters.

Meanwhile, the "independent" colleges and universities, with relatively few exceptions, are so reliant on federal financial assistance to students aid that withdrawal of that public lifeline would result in institutional death in short order for hundreds and hundreds of private institutions whose dependence on the intravenous flow of federal funds for their students' tuition is an indispensable source of revenue. Indeed, it is not uncommon for a small, private liberal arts college to derive upwards of 70 or 80 percent, or even more, of its total revenue from federal monies that are funneled to them through the grants and loans that their students receive.

And so this story has evolved in stages, from an era when no clear distinction existed between public and private, to a quite clear delineation, and now, in more recent years, to a point where the distinction is again fuzzier. This blurriness is not a matter of whether fundamentally important legal and political differences still remain between the two types of auspices or control. These differences persist. But the sources of funding -and, therefore, any given college or university's priorities and capacities- are considerably more varied now. Thus, as a practical matter, at least in some important respects, the differentiation between public and private has lost some of its meaning as the historical parallel lines of development, having diverged in the Nineteenth Century, have moved toward converged in the late Twentieth Century.

Cartter, A. M. (Ed.). (1965). Higher education in the United States. CITY: American Council on Education.

Cremin, L. A. (1970). American education: The colonial experience: 1607-1783. New York: Harper & Row.

Finkelstein, M. J. (1983). From tutor to specialized scholar: Academic professionalization in Eighteen and Nineteenth Century America. History of Higher Education Annual (Vol. 3, pp. 99-121). University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.

Finkelstein, M. J., Seal, R. K., & Schuster, J. H. (1998). The new academic generation: A profession in transformation (Chap. 3). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Gappa, J. M. & Leslie, D. W. (1993). The invisible faculty: Improving the status of part-timers in higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (1993, 1995, 1997). Washington DC: National Center for Educational Statistics.

Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). (1993). Washington DC: National Center for Educational Statistics.

Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). (1995). Washington DC: National Center for Educational Statistics.

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2 InIn fact, an even earlier effort had been made to establish a college in the colony of Virginia, but that effort -founded as Henrico College (1620-22)- failed. (Cremin, 1970; Bailyn, 1960).

3 The embryonic college was described as "puny." (Smith, R. N., 1986, p. 16.).

4 In 1775 the combined graduating classes of Harvard (the largest at 40), Yale, Kings, Dartmouth, and Philadelphia (to become Pennsylvania) colleges was 107. (Cartter, 1965, p. 20). Note, also, that in 1725 Harvard and Yale together graduated 56 students, but fully 45 years later, in 1770, the combined number of graduates from Harvard, Yale, and New Jersey (that is, Princeton) had reached only 75.

5 Counting colleges is not as easy as might be supposed; different sources give quite different tabulations in the Nineteenth Century.

6 Hutchins went so far as to warn that "Colleges and universities will find themselves converted into educational hobo jungles." (Ravitch, 1983, p. 13).

7 An "omnibus" measure covering many initiatives, the Higher Education Act's most enduring provision was the establishment of several key federal student financial aid programs to provide grants, subsidized loans, and on-campus work opportunities for students. Also in 1965, Congress enacted the landmark Elementary and Secondary Education Act, another key element of President Johnson's "Great Society" initiatives.

8 The authors conducted a secondary analysis of data derived from the 1993 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education.

9 The authors calculate that approximately 29,100 in the new cohort of 172,319 full-time faculty were not native-born U.S. citizens.

(See Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster, op. cit., Table 7, p. 32; Figure 4, p. 33; Table 7-A, p. 127.)

10 See Tables 7-A, 7-B, T-C, pp. 34-35; Table A-7A, p. 128.

11 The Court "…in effect restored the old charter of the College and endorsed the right of initiating groups to control what they had created, to gain from the state equal privileges with all other groups and to retain them even against the state itself." (Cremin, 1970, p. 47).

12 The roughly 3,700 two- and four-year colleges and universities include about 1,600 public and 2,100 private institutions. Those bare numbers do not measure strength or attractiveness of the respective sectors, but they do reflect some measure of balance.