The Changing Nature of the Academic Profession
Context of the Project
As the landscape of higher education has in recent years undergone significant changes, so correspondingly have the backgrounds, specialisations, expectations and work roles of academic staff. In many countries the academic profession is ageing, increasingly insecure, more accountable, more internationalised and less likely to be organised along disciplinary lines. It is expected to be more professional in teaching, more productive in research and more entrepreneurial in everything. A private sector has become more prominent in many national systems and new approaches to governance and management are evolving in both private and public sectors. In many places, the very definition of an academic has become ambiguous as have the boundaries between academic jobs and the jobs of other professionals, both within and beyond the walls of the academy. Some of these changes have raised questions about the attractiveness of an academic career for today’s graduates.
With expansion of higher education has come increasing differentiation, increasing expectations from society, and an evolution of professional roles that may take academics away from their original disciplines towards new forms of identity and loyalty. At the same time, knowledge has come to be identified as the most vital resource of contemporary societies, and many nations have taken great strides to improve their capacity for knowledge creation and application. This new devotion to knowledge has both expanded the role of the academy and challenged the coherence and viability of the traditional academic role. Three new emphases have become particularly pervasive:
Relevance. Whereas the highest goal of the traditional academy was to create fundamental knowledge, what has been described as the ‘scholarship of discovery’, the new emphasis of the knowledge society is on useful knowledge or the ‘scholarship of application’. This scholarship often involves the pooling and melding of insights from several disciplines and tends to focus on outcomes that have a direct impact on everyday life.
There are strong interdependencies between the goals of higher education, the rules for distributing resources, and the nature of academic work. The changes associated with movement from the ‘traditional academy’ with its stress on basic research and disciplinary teaching to the ‘relevant academy’ are largely uncharted and are likely to have unanticipated consequences. The task of the project is therefore to understand how these changes influence academic value systems and work practices and affect the nature and locus of control and power in academe.
Internationalisation. National traditions and socio-economic circumstances continue to play an important role in shaping academic life and have a major impact on the attractiveness of jobs in the profession. Yet today’s global trends, with their emphasis on knowledge production and information flow, play an increasingly important role in the push towards the internationalisation of higher education. The international mobility of students and staff has grown, new technologies connect scholarly communities around the world, and English has become the new lingua franca of the international community. Questions are therefore raised about the functions of international networks, the implications of differential access to them and the role of new communication technologies in internationalising the profession.
Management. In academic teaching and research, where professional values are traditionally firmly woven into the very fabric of knowledge production and dissemination, attempts to introduce change are sometimes received with scepticism and opposition. At the same time, a greater professionalisation of higher management is regarded as necessary to enable higher education to respond effectively to a rapidly changing external environment. The control and management of academic work will help define the nature of academic roles – including the division of labour in the academy, with a growth of newly professionalised ‘support’ roles and a possible breakdown of the traditional teaching/research nexus. New systemic and institutional processes such as quality assurance have been introduced which also change traditional distributions of power and values within academe and may be a force for change in academic practice. The project will examine both the rhetorics and the realities of academics’ responses to such managerial practices in higher education.