How American Universities are Changing

Gaye Tuchman's main areas of interest are the sociologies of culture (including media), gender, and higher education. She is a firm believer in Simmel's dictum that almost anything can be transformed into an interesting sociological problem. Although she thinks of herself as an ethnographer, she has also published work on historical methods. 

Professor Tuchman has served as president of the Eastern Sociological Society, vice-president of Sociologists for Women in Society (she was one of 18 co-founders), a member of the council of the American Sociological Association, the Board of Directors of Society for the Study for Social Problems, council of the ASA section on cultural sociology and committees of the ASA sections on cultural sociology and on sex and gender. She has also been on such editorial boards as American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Sociological Forum, Signs, Contemporary Sociology, and Discourse and Society.

She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ford Foundation, the Markle Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, and with Cynthia Fuchs Epstein held a training grant from the National. Institutes of Mental Health.

Abstract:
American colleges and universities are changing and not always for the better.  State funding of colleges is decreasing; faculty are increasingly pressured to do research, sometimes in conjunction with corporations; administrators are following a corporate career-path and are claiming rights formerly exercised by professors; full-time tenure-track faculty is decreasing.  All of these shifts in the funding and management of universities affect the education that students receive.  I discuss how they do so.