Faculty as Agents: Trading-Off, Holding Back at One Striving University

• In Event: Professional and Personal Identities of Faculty and Graduate Students

Abstract

In this paper, we show how tenure-track faculty members negotiate a space of legitimacy inside a dramatically changing university, one that is moving away from its teaching and regionally focused history and towards a research dominant, national mission. Infusing Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, action, and field, with Gouldner’s early work (1957; 1958) on locals and cosmopolitans, we argue that these tenure-track faculty members showcase how one can assert agency and narrate one’s career in creative and sometimes surprising ways.

Authors

• Leslie D. Gonzales, Clemson University

• Edna Martinez, Clemson University