Faculty: Transient Loyalty

In an unusually candid annual report, John W. Nason, president of Carleton College, discusses the long-term side effects of the “teachers’ market,” the shortage of topflight faculty that has increasingly bedeviled his excellent liberal arts school in Northfield, Minn., as well as other colleges and universities throughout the U.S.

Carleton’s president welcomes the greater rewards of cash and kudos that have accrued to the profession. “What disturbs me,” he says, “is that with colleges, universities, government and industry all competing for the services of faculty, there has developed a pattern of relatively rapid turnover.” As a result, Nason finds, “one’s personal loyalty centers on one’s profession, not on the college, which becomes a way station on the road to professional success. Faculty members are less inclined to identify themselves with their present institution. After all, it is only human nature and common sense not to become too involved in a community in which one is only a transient rather than a permanent member.”

Former Rhodes Scholar Nason, 59, has himself had only three employers since he finished college. In 1953 he was lured away from Swarthmore after 22 years there (13 as president) to head Manhattan’s Foreign Policy Association. Nine years later, in 1962, he became Carleton’s first alumnus to head the school. He calls it “my last major job.”