Models of Building a Faculty: Institutional Transformation and the Disruption of the Professoriate in Public Higher Education

This article explores patterns in the US professoriate and the relationship to institutional wealth and status in public higher education, 2012–2021. We use latent profile analysis to identify different models for building a faculty and multinomial logistic regression to describe the characteristics of institutions employing these models. The results describe the human toll of the financial disruptions facing American public higher education. The findings suggest that changes to the faculty have been widespread but uneven.