The professoriate and professionalism in the academy
This chapter explores three different literatures that contribute to a portrait of contemporary professors as professionals: comparative studies of faculty, research theorizing inequity in academia, and recent writing about the professoriate in the context of the ‘knowledge economy’. All three types of scholarship tend not to relate the professoriate and other academic professions to writing about other professions or work in general and so we must read ‘between the lines’ to get some sense of the professional cultures or identities inside post-secondary institutions.
To anchor arguments about the professoriate and academic professionalism within the sociology of professions, we begin with Freidson’s thesis (2001) that professions are a ‘third logic’, distinct from the state or the market, as experts controlling to various extents not only the conditions of their work but the very production of knowledge, an observation he derived from his ethnographies of physicians and, to a lesser extent, the American academy (Freidson, 1970). He later modified this to argue that an elite faction of a profession could retain its autonomy when pressures from the state seemed to have limited its power (Freidson, 1984). Despite the embedding of professors in the state in European countries, writers seem to agree that the professoriate displays aspects of a third logic even if they have not adopted this term. They have differed in their accounts of what this logic actually is, variously relating it to medieval ‘guild power’ (Krause, 1996); the power of dons recruited from the ruling class and their freedom to shape the academy (Annan, 1999); the power of the disciplines linked to the system of departments that either recruit or are referred applicants based on the departmental discipline (Abbott, 2000; Musselin, 2010); the recognition by the courts of a right called ‘academic freedom’; and to the institution of tenure, or unique granting of job security for life to professors (Chait, 2002; Musselin, 2010).
But by the end of the 1990s, writers agreed that this key aspect of professionalism was on the wane. There were different arguments about exactly how professional autonomy had declined – whether it was a slow erosion from powers held in medieval times; a decline from a high point in the twentieth century; or that autonomy had only been achieved in particular places but not in others and would eventually disappear worldwide. A parallel equity literature argued that the academy is deeply segmented with only a small elite having autonomy, much as Freidson had argued for the medical profession (1984). The first three of these arguments will be examined in the first section, citing three authors making the various arguments, and the last in a separate section on equity. In contrast to the generally pessimistic tone of comparative studies and much of the equity literature, the emergent field known as knowledge production dealt with in the last section of this chapter is mixed about the status of faculty in an era of globalization, with its images of privatization, marketization, commodification, financialization and neoliberalism. Some authors continue the ‘decline’ and ‘equity’ themes of earlier studies, worrying about the decentring of the professor, fragmented faculty identities and exploitation of an underclass. Others are quite hopeful and even expansive about the robustness of professorial creativity and the production of knowledge, even if professors are just one kind of ‘knowledge worker’ among many. And most promising is a critique by so-called ‘third world’ scholars of the first world’s academic obsession with globalization.
Traditional and comparative studies
Professional autonomy in the form of academic freedom and tenure are central concepts in traditional discussions about the power of the professoriate and the university as a societal institution. In the German system, Lehr and Lernfreiheit (freedom of teaching and learning) are principles assumed to be originally present. Academic freedom and tenure are defined in the 1940 statement by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which described the granting of individual professors the right to freedom of research and the publication of results, in the classroom discussing their subject, and from institutional censorship ‘when they speak as citizens’. The document also stated that ‘after the expiration of a probationary period, teachers or investigators should have permanent or continuous tenure, and their service should be terminated only for adequate cause, except in the case of retirement for age, or under extraordinary circumstances because of financial exigencies’ (AAUP, 1940). Academic freedom and the granting of tenure were assumed to be in synchrony with each other,1 with judgements dependent on a ‘company of equals’ for the admission and recognition of any one individual (Freidson and Rhea, 1963).
The early sociology of professions literature leans heavily in the direction of Anglo-America. This is why Krause’s (1996) assessment of what he terms the ‘guild power’ of medicine, law, engineering and academia in the USA, Britain, France, Italy and Germany is so useful. Guild power was the historical power obtained by guilds of craftsmen in Europe between 1100 and 1500. In applying this concept to professions, Krause defines it as that power of association that historically challenged the feudal system and permitted creation of a universitas in the medieval Latin (1996, p. 3) controlling entrance, education and dues. Guild power also includes control of the workplace and the market, as well as the profession’s relation to the state, which resonates with Freidson’s description of a ‘third logic’. Each chapter in Krause’s book outlines the particularities of the professions in the five countries and then compares them, revealing wide national variations in the prestige and power of the academic profession, from a high in Germany and Italy (1996, p. 262) to a low in Britain. He argues that scholars’ guilds have held on to their autonomy longer than the other professions ‘under local and national protection and subsidy’ (1996, p. 6) in all five countries, coping with attacks on guild powers by early capitalism, the church and central bureaucratic states (as in France). Globalization happened early to the professoriate with its Latin lingua franca, and this advantage persists to this day with English as the global language of the sciences.
Like Abbott (2000), Krause traces the robustness of the US professoriate in particular to the founding of disciplinary societies about a century ago and the recruitment of entrants via the unique departmental structure of the US university. These links to disciplinary control are also made by Musselin for France and Germany (2010). In the USA, she describes those with tenure functioning as ‘almost autonomous employees with a set of prescribed freedoms and responsibilities’ (2010, p. 68), which include teaching for the majority (the locals) and research for a minority of elites (the cosmopolitans). But Krause rejects both Abbott’s faith in the invincibility of the disciplinary system as well as neo-Marxist accounts of the irretrievable proletarianization of academia over time, emphasizing that a profession does not die – only its guild power waxes and wanes (1996, p. 283). Consistent with the two other comparative studies examined here, he concludes that in specific countries, some academic guild powers have been limited. For example, during the Thatcher era in Britain, tenure was abolished, and with massification of higher education, control over the workplace and the market has been at least partially lost (1996, p. 22). US guild power waxed from 1935 to 1965, but has waned since then, facing administrative apparatuses and globalization. Wherever these losses have occurred in recent times, Krause argues, state rationalization has been the cause.
At about the same time that Krause’s historical comparisons appeared, Slaughter and Leslie (1997) cast doubt on the robustness of the autonomy of the professoriate vis-à-vis the neoliberal state in Australia, Canada, the UK and USA over the period from 1980 to 1995, identifying and tracing a deepening corporatization and commercialization of the university, which they termed academic capitalism. They traced a ‘money trail’ which showed greater investment in research at the expense of teaching in US universities over the period. In Academic Capitalism and subsequent writing, they documented the key effect on individual faculty members as eroding their autonomy through spending their time chasing research grants and publications rather than devoting time to teaching or the public good. While university administrators were identified as leading academic capitalism, Slaughter and colleagues argued that faculty on the ground either actively pursued corporate research funding and patents or participated unhappily in such entrepreneurial activities without being able to effectively resist them. Perhaps their most persuasive observation that faculty autonomy has declined is their argument about the ‘unbundling’ of faculty activity and replacement of tenured faculty with contingent faculty and vocationally oriented middle management performing many research, teaching and student-service activities that were formerly the responsibility of faculty in the countries studied. Veblen (1918[1957]) had been the first to argue that the importation of entrepreneurial professions into the American university would challenge autonomy over faculty work and the curriculum. He critiqued the corporate pandering of university presidents (sarcastically labelled ‘captains of erudition’) to the corporate elite. Slaughter and colleagues’ contemporary research is dominated by observations about the American professoriate, supplemented by Australian research and analysis of the situation in the UK and Canada, which they see as exhibiting the same changes in faculty work due to processes of globalization. Unlike Krause, they do not contrast how faculty careers play out in the various states but instead point to their similarities. Is the American experience generalizable? Academic capitalism resulting from an erosion of state funding had been described by many previous authors in different countries, including Etzkowicz and Leydesdorff (1996), who used the metaphor of the ‘triple helix’ to identify the three logics of the market, state and academy; Welch (2002) in Australia; and Newson and Buchbinder (1986) in Canada, who made an early argument that boards of post-secondary institutions were heavily peopled by corporate leaders. These authors have continued to publish evidence of the effects of entrepreneurial activity on the faculty of their respective countries, lending credence to the argument that academic capitalism has transformed professorial and institutional autonomy in relation to the market over the past several decades. Or is this just sour grapes about the (imagined) loss of a golden age (Scott, 2007)? We will return to this argument below.
Because they focus on countries with historically well-developed post-secondary sectors, the two Anglo-American and European studies reviewed to this point do not reveal very well a global view of the situation of faculty. Altbach’s (1996, 2003) comparison of academics in 14 countries appearing at the same time as those of Krause and Slaughter and colleagues partially addressed this problem. (None of the three cites the others.) Based on his original study of academic freedom and a subsequent book called The Decline of the Guru, Altbach highlights the organizational differences among faculty in Asia, North and South America, Europe and Africa, theorizing a centre–periphery model within which universities in developing countries are closely modelled on those of their colonizers. He relates this pattern to either the imposition of the colonizing nation’s university system within the captured nation continued in the postcolonial era or the adoption of the colonizer’s system rather than developing a new system. This is consistent with the observations that we will make in the next section about the deeply segmented nature of the academy and the exclusion of indigenous knowledges worldwide.2 At his time of writing, Altbach pointed out that even though over half of the ‘world’s 80 million postsecondary students’ are in developing or middle-income countries, ‘very little is known about the professionals who are responsible for teaching and learning in those universities’ and what little is known ‘is not positive’ (2003, p. 1). Perhaps reflecting the hold of colonizing nations, he argues that, overall, the faculty in most countries of the world do not share the colonizers’ tradition of academic freedom (2003, p. 15). Nor have most professors attained the northern standard of a doctorate. As such, Altbach terms them ‘a profession on the periphery’ (2003, p. 3) which looks for leadership to the faculty of the north. Although there are some elite universities among the countries he studied, they maintain the language of the northern colonizers; for example, English and French are entrenched in Africa, not African languages. English is typically the language of instruction and research publication in northern journals. Like Slaughter and colleagues, Altbach relates leadership in research in the north to ‘close relationships with multinational corporations’ (2003, p. 4) and an ‘international labor market for scholars and scientists’ (2003, p. 7) that flows from south to north, as do international students, corroborated by the international survey undertaken by Welch (1997). This is the proverbial ‘brain drain’ that continues to impoverish the ‘third world’ in what is called the ‘knowledge economy’.
In the intervening years to our time of writing, much progress has been made in documenting conditions of faculty outside the Anglo-American world, and there is a dreary consistency about their conclusions. Altbach argues that academic freedom for professors was never present in most of the world; Slaughter and colleagues agree with many previous and subsequent authors that the notion of what may at one time have been a university working for the public good in the centre has lost its way. And even Krause, who sees some guild power maintained in European states, admitted at his time of writing that professorial proletarianization is waxing in the global economy.
Research theorizing inequity and knowledge production in academia
While comparative studies reached for a ‘grand narrative’ of the professoriate, there emerged a parallel literature of in-depth investigations of inequity within the professoriate.3 This separate sociological literature began to document processes of exclusion for women professors from the academy (especially in science) as well as locating and publishing their achievements in the UK, New Zealand, Canada and the USA (e.g. Acker, 1994). The sociology of professions literature had documented gendered exclusionary practices in professions as early as the 1980s (Witz, 1992). But the feminist movement burst onto the scene of Anglo-American universities in the latter part of the twentieth century, bringing with it critical feminist scholars who argued that women also brought a different epistemology to male-dominated fields (e.g. Haraway, 1988). This was theorized as ‘standpoint theory’ by Dorothy E. Smith in Canada, focusing on the social sciences (1987) and by Sandra Harding in the USA, focusing on the sciences (1986). Eventually, Harding generalized her argument to the dominance of neocolonial science over local knowledges all over the world in the production of a Eurocentric academy (1998). The academy also became a site for activism for gay and lesbian rights (e.g. Lorde, 1984), as well as for queer theorists who focus on knowledge production and queering the academy (e.g. Butler, 1999).
Preceding and paralleling this first-world feminist and sexuality literature, there had been emancipatory calls that pointed to the Eurocentric academy as the source of oppression of racially minoritized and Indigenous populations and the knowledge production within them as laced with colonial visions of the ‘Other’ (Said, 1978). But these early feminist, anti-colonial and other emancipatory efforts have been largely superseded by more recent postcolonial and poststructural arguments that either acknowledge their essentialism as ‘strategic’ or reject the essentialism inherent in characterizing all women as oppressed or all colonized groups as having the same experience (e.g. Loomba, 1998). Alternatively, they emphasize the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and ability as axes of oppression; or write from specific locations about the history of specific regions, such as New Zealand (e.g. L. Smith, 1999).
Historically, gender, race, class and sexuality movements linked their social projects to mere access to education and employment in the academy. But case studies of professors identified a ‘chilly climate’ once such groups were within the academy, challenging notions that merely increasing numbers of the so-called marginalized groups eliminates discrimination (Hall and Sandler, 1982; Wagner et al., 2008). Further, the voices of feminist, anti-racist and queer scholars contesting Eurocentric knowledge production in their writings continue to build and expose the mechanisms by which the fields of science, medicine and engineering have come to dominate other fields. The valuation of research activities over teaching activities is also evident across fields, with marginalized groups differentially involved in these activities. The Kogan and Teicher collection (2007), which includes China and India, explores this theme, and a critical scholar reading between the lines can see that marginalization in the academy cuts across multiple intersecting axes of inequities of race, gender, class and sexual orientation, based on notions of perceived ‘relevance’ or the socio-economic importance of one’s activities and knowledge. Perhaps the fastest growing research on the professoriate focuses on the inequities visited on ‘just in time’ or contingent faculty. The explosive growth of contingent faculty in some jurisdictions, replacing tenured and tenure stream faculty, signals a progressive loss of autonomy by faculty and their challenges in negotiating the conditions of their work with administrative apparatuses. This is illustrated in the Welch survey (1997) as well as a more recent comparative study conducted by Stromquist and colleagues (2007).
The Stromquist study links the equity and comparative literatures, citing both Altbach’s Decline of the Guru as well as the unbundling of faculty work in advanced capitalism in countries beyond Anglo-America. From this composite review of the tertiary sectors in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Denmark, Russia and South Africa, a portrait of increasing diversification of higher education emerges that is structurally linked to economic determinants (funding arrangements between the state and higher education institutions and employment arrangements between institutions and their faculty). While they note an overall pattern of segmentation across the education sectors, it is clear that situations for faculty differ across countries. Notable is the distinction they make between publicly funded and privately funded universities. Stromquist and colleagues argue that institutions that have been able to hold on to public sector status, such as in Denmark, have to a large extent been able to ‘protect … academic personnel’, while ‘the not for profit sector is moving towards an unstable professoriate, poorly paid, hired mostly on a per-hour basis, and for whom sharing in academic governance is a distant dream’ (2007, p. 114). While the private sector in higher education has always been present in some countries, Stromquist and colleagues note the dramatic shift from full-time to contingent faculty in Mexico, Brazil and Peru and the poorly paid professoriate of Russia, who must resort to additional part-time work to make a living (2007, p. 114).
There is also a ‘feminization trend in private institutions’ in Russia (Stromquist et al., 2007, p. 130), where 58 per cent of faculty working in private tertiary institutions are women holding multiple positions to make ends meet. Indeed, gender and other differences, first identified as an equity issue in the UK, the USA, Australia and Canada (e.g. Abbas and McLean, 2001; Muzzin, 2008) is present globally. For example, Welch’s (1997) data show that women tend to be stuck mainly in their country of birth, in what he terms the ‘indigenous’ sector of the professoriate, suggesting that ‘the opportunity to travel and study abroad actively discriminates against women academics’ (1997, p. 329). That is, they are anchored to their respective teaching and administrative posts, not able to experience the pleasures of Mannheim’s ‘free floating intellectual’ (1936).4 In one of many examples, Mazawi (2005) describes how the Saudi Arabian professoriate has very few avenues to influence government policy, and male Saudi professors are in the most profitable disciplines and hold the most prestigious ranks. As a result, ‘women do not control the production of knowledge and are more involved in teaching than research’ (2005, p. 242). It is significant that the equity literature does not bend to the idea that inequity is a permanent and incontestable aspect of the academy that negates professorial autonomy. Certainly the goal of feminist, anti-racist and queer theorists has been to identify inequity so as to change it. Literature that identifies these inequities writ large in the ‘global marketplace’ visualizes an alternative future. For example, Welch (2002), in an extended discussion on ‘going global’ in Australia, contrasts Jane Knight’s (1995) concept of ‘internationalization’ with sinister aspects of ‘globalization’. Internationalization focuses on the ‘common good’ embodied in organizations ‘such as the United Nations and its charter’ (Welch, 2002, p. 434). Welch also refers to growing resistance to ‘the economic model of globalization [that] threatens to overwhelm prospects for more creative and more democratic pedagogies in higher education’ (2002, p. 464), concluding that higher education is ‘Janus faced’ with ‘one side facing towards twentieth century ideals of cooperation and … peace and social justice, while the other side faces toward increasing integration of universities … into the world of deregulated global business’ (2002, p. 469).
The ‘decentred professor’ in the global knowledge economy?
In this section, we turn to an international literature that has emerged in the past decade that speculates about the effects on the professoriate of the ‘networked society’, new public management, academic capitalism and globalization along with fledgling investigations of the construction of professorial identities.
In comparison to visions of academia in decline, a more postmodern (and thus uncertain and sometimes hopeful) approach is offered in a recent book by Peters, Marginson and Murphy on the ‘creative economy’ (2009). Peters (2009), in a chapter in that book, points out that however one theorizes it, there is agreement that we have moved from one set of relations to a new one in which mass communication is made possible because digital goods defy the laws of scarcity. How does this affect the professoriate? Arguably, in material terms, the ‘space’ of higher learning is no longer contained within the walls of the university. This is not a new concept in the academy, where ‘distance learning’ is normalized. But Welch (1998), for one, contends that the cumulative postmodern disruption of ‘conventional assumptions regarding knowledge’ itself (including questioning the role of theory in knowledge production and the primacy of the disciplines as organizing structures of the academy), has destabilized the notion that only professors have expertise. There has been a continuing controversy about the idea that the hegemony of knowledge created by theory-driven experimental scientists and carried out within universities, or ‘Mode 1 knowledge’, is being superseded by ‘Mode 2 knowledge’, which is ‘socially distributed, application oriented, transdisciplinary and subject to multiple accountabilities’ (Nowotny et al., 2003, Martimianakis and Muzzin, 2015). Welch sees this displacement as a process of deprofessionalization in traditional sociological terms, or as a decentring of professorial identities in postmodern terminology (1998, p. 5). As information is available to billions of people in real time, never before have so many people in so many strata had the capacity to contribute to knowledge-making without formally being ‘in’ the university. Those involved now can learn from academics and non-academics worldwide, without having to leave their homes.
Marginson (2009), like Peters, doesn’t jump to the conclusion that these are negative developments. At the level of volition of the individual professor, he teases out selective philosophies of ‘freedom’ that have been considered to characterize the professor’s everyday work, pointing out that it is still possible to do work conceived by someone else and that ‘[n]ew ideas may emerge under conditions of necessity’ (2009, p. 92). Drawing on the idea that the ability to do good does not necessarily privilege the agent, Marginson points to professors who may choose poorly paid employment to be able to ‘make a difference’ as an ‘independent entity’, with the will and ‘power to act’ (2009, pp. 98–99). He sees a ‘deep complementarity’ between professorial ‘individual agency and the social setting’ (2009, p. 100) and theorizes that in research, ‘the project of self-construction is never finished’ (2009, p. 101). At the level of the university, leading scholars are present, and research training (at the nexus of teaching and research) is virtually monopolized along with advanced credentialing, even though more research may take place in KFOs (knowledge-forming organizations) outside the university. Marginson points to research achievement as the core of university status – a magnet that draws students and scholars alike. New public management (NPM) has resulted in what he terms ‘organizational convergence’ across KFOs towards innovation discourse, a point explored at length by Martimianakis (2011; Martimianakis and Muzzin, 2015) in her research on faculty identity in medicine and engineering, where the boundaries between industry and the university have been particularly permeable and faculty can become their own entrepreneurs. However, Marginson insists that boundaries between these institutions are ‘robust in the face of efforts to break them down’ (2009, p. 106).
The vast majority of the literature published recently on the academy does not take such an accommodating view of the professorial transition into a knowledge economy. One disturbing observation is that equity literature produced by academics outside disciplinary spaces, originally associated with resistance to disciplinarity from the margins, can be circled back through mainstream global educational policy. This stripping of critical content is possible because international organizations such as the OECD, the World Bank and UNESCO advocate for strategies of innovation that call for the wide adoption of interdisciplinary research as a way to make knowledge production relevant without attending to the ontological differences and historical politics of that research (Martimianakis, 2011). Thus, applied forms of knowledge-making, at the core of neoliberal innovation-discourse, can reconfigure even academics working for equity, as professors are encouraged to extend their work in industry and community contexts to ‘engender creativity’. Faculty become not professionals but service providers (Martimianakis and Muzzin, 2015). Performance indicators are normalized and discourses of ‘accountability’, ‘transparency’, ‘productivity’ and ‘relevance’ appear in university mission statements. Broadbent and Laughlin (1997) have theorized this as an ‘accounting logic’, generally questioned by a range of professionals who do not see such discourses as relevant to their work as professionals but who acquiesce as managed professionals. With receding state involvement in the financing of massified public education, tertiary institutions around the world are described as actively pursuing a vicious cycle of pursuing funds while overproducing graduates who join the professorial precariat. Buildings, departments and entire faculties (even seats in lecture halls) are renamed to commemorate endowments, and faculty resistance to this market takeover of academic space seems to have little effect. There is worldwide competition for students, standardization of curricula and ‘poaching’ of highly skilled labour.
The global shrinking of tenure-track positions and expansion of more contingent and flexible employment arrangements lead Bousquet to lament that the ‘disappearance of the professoriate’ (2008, p. 71) will not be caused by technological replacement but through a restructuring of labour (though we would argue the two are linked). Levin and Shaker (2011), studying the self-representations of full-time non-tenure track faculty, describe this growing segment of the professoriate as having ‘dualistic identities’ which mirror their hybrid work arrangements – partly ‘profession’ and partly ‘job’. Although Scott (2007) feels they ‘still manage their own time and operate as relatively free-standing professionals’ (2007, p. 208), Levin and Shaker argue that their lack of job security and capacity to influence decision-making means restricted self-determination and low self-esteem. To succeed, they must be agile workers, life-long learners, participating in continual self- and organizational improvement. Knowledge workers are also not necessarily PhD trained nor in professorial positions. New roles within the academy, including the faculty developer, the consultant, and the community or industry partner, are increasingly common in university classrooms and research laboratories.
This NPM (Broadbent and Laughlin, 1997; Dent and Whitehead, 2002) in theory is all about reproduction, standardization and homogenization; it has no regard for intellectual freedom; and there has been unprecedented government interference in university affairs. Still, Marginson (2009) argues that professors and other academic professionals have been able to create ‘bounded niches’ for themselves, sometimes by not being tied to one master. Kolsaker (2008), examining the English situation, concludes that faculty can tolerate and even sustain managerialism, just as Nixon (1997) had observed earlier, describing university teachers in the UK as focused on their core professional responsibilities to their students, learning as a public good, and collegiality.
Perhaps the most important development in the literature on globalization and the professoriate is an occasionally perceptible shifting of the gaze away from the centre to admit a writer from the ‘third world’ who critiques how it is viewed through Anglo-American professorial eyes. Said’s (1978) Orientalism was an early example, but Samir Amin’s critique of American, European and Chinese constructions of globalization in Maldevelopment (2011) stands out as another voice from what Altbach terms ‘the periphery’. Subotzky (1999), also working in the so-called periphery, offers a model of the contemporary university based on a higher education–community partnership model that is an alternative to the ‘entrepreneurial university’. Using South Africa as a case study, Subotzky outlines the social benefits of expanding knowledge-making into the community as well as the intrinsic benefits to the professoriate in having the capacity to make a difference socially in ways that are consistent with the ‘intrinsic’ mission of the university.
Appadurai (2000) has made a general critique of the way the academy ‘has found in globalization an object around which to conduct its special internal quarrels’ where multiple case studies and comparisons have ‘an increasingly parochial quality’ (2000, p. 2). Instead, he urges academics to stop navel-gazing and use their ‘academic imagination’ to study ‘globalization from below’, especially the activities of cash-strapped NGOs working for social justice worldwide (‘grassroots globalization’). As he puts it, ‘it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge’ (2000, p. 6). Notably, he critiques an outmoded form of ‘research’ that sees geographic spaces as stable, when populations are mobile; that aims to be value-free and run all findings through a traditional assessment apparatus for replicability (2000, p. 11); that aims for a respectable ‘shelf life’ (2000, p. 12); and that uses an alienating vocabulary of ‘fora such as the World Bank, the UN system, the WTO, NAFTA, and GATT’ (2000, p. 17). He asks, ‘[c]an we find ways to legitimately engage scholarship by public intellectuals here [in the USA] and overseas whose work is not primarily conditioned by professional criteria of dissemination?’ (2000, p. 14). His answer is that this would involve stepping back from ‘abstractions that constitute our own professional practice to seriously consider the problems of the global everyday’ (2000, p. 18).
The three bodies of literature reviewed here on the professoriate and other knowledge workers in the academy span comparative, critical equity and postmodern theoretical perspectives. Comparative views that emerged in the 1990s from the first world are by their nature mainstream and oriented to global narratives. The equity literature, a view from or of marginalized groups, is by its nature emancipatory, and oriented towards social justice, whether it appears in the first or third worlds. And the newest literature, a situated view rather than from ‘nowhere’ (Haraway, 1988), is local, self-reflexive, situated and open-ended, dwelling as it does in everyday professional practice.
Several futures are suggested by our review. There is enough evidence to conclude that Freidson’s ‘third logic’ has survived in the form of elite professors. This group can be seen as retaining its academic freedom to produce knowledge (albeit on the backs of Welch’s ‘indigenous’ professors). In fact, Marginson’s excursus on creativity seems to fit the elite professor who jetsets around the world doing research while, as part of a gendered, racialized process, lesser faculty take care of students and other business (salvaging their professionalism through devotion to their students and the public good rather than basking in the glamour of being a research star or a talk-show intellectual). This, of course, depends on their embodying the kind of professionalism that supports a system of inequality – not the ideal outcome.
An alternative conclusion could be that the great experiment of the internet, Google and Wikileaks, promises a true emancipation of knowledge historically produced in the siloes of dons’ jurisdictions, disciplines or colonial enclaves that is as significant as the industrial revolution. Although warnings of ‘inconvenient truths’ echo in our minds about professorial autonomy and the internet, we could choose to believe that creativity, as described in this chapter, for example, by Marginson, Kolsaker, Nixon and others, will survive under conditions of limited free will.
Finally, as processes of internationalization unfold, we could imagine a third development – that all of the resistance to accounting logic and segmented hierarchies of academic professionals documented here would continue to make headway led by visionary third-world scholars. There is evidence that we are on that road: there are now voices urging us to rethink what we count as research and knowledge, and we do have inspiring proposals from indigenous scholars on the table. For example, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) calls for a decolonizing of academic research; Shiva (2008) asks for a reworking of disciplines to include multiple knowledges; and while Amin (2011) calls for a delinking of the south from the north, Subotzky (1999) and many others present visions of the university as emancipatory rather than colonizing; and Appadurai (2000) suggests that a good first step in the direction of these proposals would be for elite academics to just ‘reverse [their] gaze’ from problems of the academy to the plight of the impoverished world.
Notes
1Recent court cases in North America have conflated the concept of institutional autonomy of universities and individual professorial freedom, with rulings tending to favour institutional powers rather than the individual (Gillin, 2002; O’Neil, 2005). The power of professional (rather than academic) administrators where universities have autonomy from the state is relevant here, as is the decline of individual professorial freedoms and security (Kogan and Teichler, 2007).
2‘Indigenous’ here refers to a wider demographic than Aboriginal, to which the word commonly refers.
3For example, Foucauldian analysis moves beyond ‘grand narratives’ to examine how professors construct their identities via the uptake of dominant discourses such as neoliberalism (Martimianakis, 2011; Davies and Bansel, 2010). Circulating discourses operate as taken for granted ‘truths’ that govern spaces and the people within them (termed governmentality), making certain activities and institutions more visible than others and bringing objects and subjects into being.
4Mannheim argued that the professoriate was able to escape the relativity of its position, viewing ‘the peculiarity of our own mode of life’ (1936, p. 47). Such ‘free-floating intellectuals’ are said to have declined in Ango-American democracies, although Scott (2007) claims these ‘celebrities’ are alive and well and serve to brand the professoriate.
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