Structural Characteristics And Its Causes Analysis Of Teachers In American Elite Liberal Arts Colleges

On October 24,2015,the State Council issued the “Overall Plan to Promote the Construction of World-class Universities and Disciplines”,which opened a major prelude to China's “double-class” construction.“Double-class” has become one of the hot topics in China's higher education.To build a world-class university and a world-class discipline,it is inseparable from first-class undergraduate teaching,and to achieve first-class undergraduate teaching,we must also have first-class teachers to support.The Elite Liberal Arts Colleges,which is famous for its first-class undergraduate teaching,has many experiences that are worth learning from,one of them is the construction of teachers.This study is based on the “Best National Liberal Arts Colleges” Rankings in 2018 that published by the U.S.News and the “Best Undergraduate Teaching Program” of the Liberal Arts Colleges in 2017,selects Williams College,Carleton College and Amherst College as the case,collects basic information of teachers in the three case schools,and uses the CV analysis,and supplemented by the Classification of Instructional Programs and the Carnegie Classification of Institution of Higher Education,the paper analyzes the gender structure,full-time and part-time structure,discipline structure,professional title structure and academic degree structure of teachers in three elite liberal arts colleges.Research shows that there are the following structural features about teachers of American elite liberal arts colleges: in terms of gender structure,there are more male teachers and fewer female teachers,overall,the sex ratio is balanced;In terms of full-time and part-time structure,there are more full-time teachers and less part-time teachers;In the disciplinary structure,teachers are mainly distributed in the social sciences,humanities,science,education,art,interdisciplinary,and agronomy seven universities.And some teachers have crossprofessional and interdisciplinary teaching situations;In the structure of professional titles,there are a large number of teachers with professors and assistant professors,and the overall title of teachers is “Reverse-God” structure;In terms of academic structure,the number of highly educated teachers is large,the number of teachers with low education is small,and the teacher's academic qualifications are “Inverted Pyramidal” structure.Through analysis,this study believes that there are three main reasons for structural features that mentioned above about the teachers of American elite liberal arts colleges.The first is historical reasons,that is,the lag of the development of American women's higher education and long-standing gender inequality in American society;The second is the realistic background factor,that is,an important product of American elite liberal arts colleges adheres to the tradition of elite education,under the background of popularization and marketization of higher education;The third is the self-development characteristics of the American elite liberal arts colleges,which mainly includes its relatively independent funding model and tradition of “professor-governing school” that has always been adhered to.Finally,this research puts some suggestions for the construction of teacher in Chinese universities,based on the first-class undergraduate teaching construction in China.