This book reports the results of a comprehensive study of educational administration faculty conducted during 1986, which compares attitudes and behaviors of the 1986 cohort with earlier cohorts of educational administration professors and also compares characteristics of educational administration faculty with their counterparts in other academic fields. The first chapter provides an overview of the evolution of the professoriate across disciplines, the development of the educational administration professoriate, a review of the research, and a description of the design of the study. Chapter 2 presents information about the characteristics of educational administration departments, while the personal and professional characteristics of educational administration faculty are described in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 discusses how faculty members spend their professional time, and chapter 5 describes their beliefs about preparation programs and the field of educational administration. Chapter 6 focuses on one subgroup: those who entered the professoriate within the past five years. Chapter 7 discusses indices of program quality and presents reputational rankings of educational administration programs. The final chapter summarizes the major findings of the study and discusses implications of the findings for preparing educational leaders. References are included, and instrumentation from the study is appended, along with tabulated data. (TE)