The Academic Profession

The book's central argument is that the academic profession in American universities is systematically subordinated to administrative power, and that this subordination corrupts the university's proper mission of advancing knowledge and educating students. Cattell rejects the prevailing corporate model of university governance, in which presidents and trustees hold authority over appointments, curriculum, and policy while professors are treated as employees rather than as self-governing professionals. He contends that this hierarchy fails to guarantee the independence, security, and self-respect of the professoriate, and that it drives away the strongest minds. The remedy is professorial self-government: the university should be 'a democracy of scholars serving the larger democracy of which it is a part' .

The book is not a single continuous treatise but a composite volume. Cattell's own analysis is followed by a series of two hundred and ninety-nine unsigned letters from leading men of science holding academic positions, along with contributed articles by Joseph Jastrow, George T. Ladd, John J. Stevenson, J. E. Creighton, George M. Stratton, Stewart Paton, John Jay Chapman, James P. Munroe, and Jacob Gould Schurman . The unsigned letters provide firsthand accounts from professors at institutions including Yale, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, Chicago, and state universities, documenting their experiences of administrative autocracy. Cattell structures this material to shift the evidentiary weight from his own polemic to the collective testimony of the profession itself.

The volume is the third in the Science and Education series, published by The Science Press in 1913 . The first volume was a translation of Poincaré's Foundations of Science; the second dealt with Medical Research and Education . The Academic Profession represents the series' turn from the content of scientific education to the institutional conditions under which it is conducted. It extends Cattell's diagnosis in earlier essays, particularly his argument that the university must be freed from 'externalism'—the intrusion of business methods, publicity, and administrative efficiency into academic life. The book supplies the empirical testimony that his earlier polemics had asserted.

The Academic Profession, published in 1913, was one of the provocations that led Columbia's trustees to consider retiring Cattell. President Nicholas Murray Butler reacted against Cattell's 'vociferous differences with administration policy,' and the trustees raised the question of Cattell's removal three times before his eventual dismissal in 1917 . Cattell's critique in the book—that the university should be a democracy of scholars—directly challenged Butler's authority. After his dismissal for opposing the draft, Columbia's action became a cause célèbre for academic freedom, and many American universities subsequently established tenure as a means of protecting unpopular beliefs . The book is thus both a diagnosis of the problem and a contributing cause of the conflict it described.

A common misconception treats The Academic Profession as a sociological or descriptive study of the professoriate—an analysis of career structures, demographics, or professional roles. It is instead a work of advocacy and institutional critique, written in the 'spirit of the advocate and the reformer,' as Cattell acknowledged . It does not attempt neutral description of the academic profession but argues for its reorganization. The book's empirical content, the 299 letters, serves to support a normative thesis about how universities should be governed, not to provide a balanced portrait. Readers seeking a dispassionate account of academic careers will find instead a polemical intervention in a live institutional struggle, shaped by Cattell's own conflicts with Columbia's administration.

Cattell's principal remedy is the formation of professorial associations and the institutionalization of faculty self-government. He calls for 'an association of professors of American universities, based on associations in the different universities,' with the objects of promoting university interests, advancing higher education and research, and addressing problems of administration and the status of professors . He also advocates a strict curtailment of presidential power and perquisites, with faculty councils given authority over academic affairs. His most inclusive answer to the question of university administration is deliberately minimalist: 'that university is fortunate which has the least administration,' and his advice to administrators is 'don't' . The book is thus a blueprint for faculty governance as much as a critique.