ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a discussion of the problems facing the contemporary university and their effects on the academic profession; it is presented in a comparative and international context because similar issues affect higher education worldwide and an international perspective can shed light on American realities. American faculty are similarly unenthusiastic about internationalizing the curriculum; fewer than half agree that the curriculum should be more international. American faculty feel that United States higher education is at the center of an international academic system; the world comes to the United States, and therefore international initiatives are superfluous. The traditional concept of the professoriate is being supplemented by new hiring and promotion arrangements across the US, and in other countries as well. In the United States, a Carnegie report entitled Scholarship Assessed represents the next step in the effort to place more emphasis on teaching and to expand the concept of intellectual work as well as to assess the totality of academic work.
