by Theodore Caplow/Reece J. McGee
Foreward by Jacques Barzun

The Academic Marketplace is a straightforward, hard-hitting exposé of the American university. Caplow and McGee consider all the working parts of the system and assess their suitability to the professed purpose. Their report on the actualities, myths, and consequences of routines thus amounts to an anatomy of an institution - an anatomy that does not present a pretty picture. We learn, for example, that the chief criteria used in making appointments are prestige and compatibility, not teachin ability. The authors describe the precipitous decline in teaching loads and the explain how this tendency is related to the new seller's market, on the one hand, and to the extravagantly indeterminate structure of the university as an institution, on the other.

Not only is the temper judicious, the fact well gathered and competently marshaled, but the expression of results is invariably lucid. In a new introduction, the authors sort out fact from legend and discern trends, they address the validit of their own research methods and the applicability of their original findings to today's academic marketplace. They observe that the essential commodity offered in the academic marketplace is still the same - the mysterious intangible called prestige, by which universities, colleges, departments, disciplines, fields of inquiry, journals, and called prestige, by which universities, colleges, departments, disciplines, fields of inquiry, journals, and ultimately faculty candidates are ranked from high to low, and raised up and cast down accordingly.

"This volume is a must for anyone interested in academic problems and will produce the emotion of recognition in those concerned, and the emotion of surprise in those outside the field" -- Los Angeles Times

"Professors Caplow and McGee have given scholarly respectability to what many a professor has long suspected: Competition in the academic marketplace is as severe as in the business world. [Their book] might come to have the same function for the professor as machiavelli's work had for ambitious prince." -- Midwest Journal of Political Science

More books by Theodore Caplow

The First Measured Century: An Illustrated Gude to Trends in America, 1900-2000
Sociologie Militaire
Peace Games
Perverse Incentives - The Neglect of Social Technology in the Public Sector
Elementary Sociology
Recent Social Trends in the United States 1960-1990
Leviathan Transformed - Seven National States in the New Century
The Sociology of Work
The Urban Ambience
Principles of Organization
Two Against One: Coalitions in Triad
Old Men Drunk and Sober
Toward Social Hope
Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change & Continuity
All Faithful People: Change & Continuity in Middletown's Religion
Managing an Organization
American Social Trends
Systems of War & Peace

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