ABSTRACT
The academic profession is a multitude of academic tribes and territories. Disciplinary and institutional locations together compose the primary matrix of induced and enforced differences among American academics. These two internal features of the system itself are more important than such background characteristics of academics as class, race, religion, and gender in determining work-centered thought and behaviour. Institutional differentiation interacts with disciplinary differentiation in a bewildering fashion that steadily widens and deepens the matrix of differences that separate American academics from each other. Remedial education is spread throughout American higher education, from leading universities to community colleges, but it is relatively light when selectivity is high and quite heavy when selection is low or even nonexistent. A relatively powerless proletariat exists in American academic life, centered in employment that is part-time and poorly paid. Positioned between state and market, academic professionalism, however fragmented, remains a necessary foundation for performance and progress in higher education.
