Faculty culture and bibliographic instruction: an exploratory analysis - The Library and Undergraduate Education

tradition, it may appear in the nature and purpose of faculty

research and scholarship. (p. 26)

By the end of World War 11, the various components of faculty culture--teaching, research, student advisement, administration, institutional and public service--had emerged (Finkelstein, 1984, p. 29). Martin (1969), in his book Conformity, concluded by the late 1960s, whether by academic specialization, type of school, and several other variables: Faculty are more alike than dissimilar in their attitudes toward educational assumptions, values, and goals; the criteria for institutional excellence; and the prospects for professional or institutional change" (p. 206).

What is the source of this conformity? "The prevalent notion of'quality' among American college and university leaders," asserted Bergquist (1992), "was built on the image of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and other private universities that converted from the British to the German prototype by the beginning of the twentieth century" (p. 24). Jencks and Riesman (1968) referred to the birth of the "university college." This type of college, they note, is one "whose primary purpose is to prepare students for graduate work of some kind-primarily in the arts and sciences but also in professional subjects ranging from law and medicine to business and social work" (p. 24). Such a college may be part of a university with a large graduate school or a geographically isolated and administratively small college, but even these institutions draw their faculty from the same pool as the large graduate schools, 'seeking the same virtues and looking askance at the same presumed vices" (p. 24). Jencks and Riesman also observed:

Out of more than 2,000 undergraduate colleges, probably no more

than 100 today really fit the above [university college description.

Yet these are the most prestigious colleges in the country, to which

the ablest and most ambitious students usually gravitate. They also

attract the ablest faculty and administrators and the most generous

philanthropists. And they provide a model for most of the other

1,900 colleges regarded as desirable, even if not immediately accessible.

Drawn by emulation on the one side and pushed by accrediting

agencies on the other, an increasing number of terminal colleges

hire Ph.D.s from the leading graduate schools even though

they fear the impact of men who may not be happy or complacent at

a terminal college, and who may also make others less happy or complacent.

As faculty recruiting becomes more national and less parochial,

even colleges that might prefer staff from the old parish are

forced to look elsewhere if they are to grow ... Virtually all terminal

colleges want to hire faculty of the kind now hired by the university

colleges. Whether or not these faculty come out of the subculture

to which a college has traditionally been tied is secondary. (pp. 24-25)

A result, according to Martin (1969), is that even innovative institutions use conventional criteria of excellence to measure their standards (pp. 228-29).