Death of dignity for professors as professionals.

Bonnie, this is thoughtful, thorough.  It also triggers in your writer a discussion he had over the weekend with a friend from Ontario, Canada. We both started out as high school teachers together before migrating to higher education.  It centered on this.  The old model of faculty behavior stems from the guild system in the Middle Ages.  Faculty in effect are "master craftsmen" who organize their field of endeavor according to collegial standards.  Now, in our time, the industrial model of top-down command structures drives the agenda.  For instance, your humble servant did not design our course.  The corporation, also known as the university, has "canned" it, and the person who "teaches it" simply is a paper marker, not a central design force, power.  Instead of custom-made "shoes" we have "assembly line" shoes, and academics more and more are the equivalent of workers on an assembly line than the master guild craftsmen of times gone by.  Of course, there are variations on this theme, but the overall drift today is toward top-down standardization and away from independent craft design as in years gone past.  There.  He and I agreed.  The drift here and there are the same. Dr. Rux