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Abstract
This article seeks to compare the characteristics of the academic profession as described historically by Perkin in 1969 against the definitions of a profession derived from the published views of sociologists and others. It then measures the position of the academic community today against these definitions: a common range of professional tasks and competences, representation by a membership-led organisation, participation in institutional governance, a role in determining professional development and conditions of service, powers of self-regulation, and exclusive control of the knowledge and expertise it professes. The article goes on to analyse how the characteristics of twenty-first century academic life measure up to these provisions and concludes that in many ways they now fall substantially short to the extent that in a strict sense it is no longer possible to claim that academics belong to an academic profession.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to acknowledge with gratitude the assistance that Mary Henkel gave him in identifying sociologists who have contributed to the study of the professions. With typical modesty she did not refer him to her own contributions, which the author has drawn on.
Notes
1 Thomas Goldie Cook, ed., Education and the Professions (London: Methuen for the History of Education Society, 1973).
2 Harold James Perkin, ‘The Professionalisation of University Teaching, in Education and the Professions, ed. Thomas Goldie Cook (London: Methuen, 1973), 82–3.
3 Harold James Perkin, Key Profession: The History of the Association of University Teachers (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969).
4 Perkin, Key Profession, 227.
5 Ibid., 227–8.
6 Martin Trow, ‘Problems in the Transition from Elite to Mass Higher Education’, in General Report on Future Structures of Post-Secondary Education (Paris: OECD, 1974), 55–101.
7 Albert Henry Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
8 Ibid., 125.
9 William Locke and Alice Bennion, ‘The United Kingdom: Academic Retreat or Professional Renewal’, in Changing Governance and Management in Higher Education, ed. William Locke, William K. Cummings and Donald Fisher (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 175–198.
10 Locke and Bennion, ‘The United Kingdom: Academic Retreat or Professional Renewal’, 194.
11 Geoffrey Millerson, ‘Education in the Professions’, in History of Education Society Education and the Professions (London: Methuen, 1973), 1.
12 Sinclair Goodlad, Education for the Professions: Quis Custodiet–? (London: SRHE/NFER-Nelson, 1984), 6.
13 Keith M. Macdonald, The Sociology of the Professions (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 1.
14 Eliot Freidson, Professionalism Reborn: Theory, Prophecy and Policy (Cambridge: Polity, 1994).
15 Julia Evetts, ‘The Sociological Analysis of Professionalism: Occupational Change in the Modern World’, International Sociology 18 (2003): 395–415.
16 Mary Henkel, Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2000), 16.
17 Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, Table 8.2.
18 David Willetts, Opening Address (Conference on Celebrating Robbins and its Impact on British Higher Education, Institute of Education, London, October 24, 2013).
19 Michael L. Shattock, Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945–2011 (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press, 2012), 186.
20 CVCP, Letter from the Chairman to Dr Kenneth Urwin, March 4, 1953, CVCP Archive Vol. 9 MSS 399 1/1/9, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.
21 Michael L. Shattock, ‘The Academic Profession in Britain: A Study in the Failure to Adapt to Change’, Higher Education 41 (2001): 27–47.
22 Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion, 130.
23 American Association of University Professors. ‘About the AAUP’, http://www.aaup.org/about-aaup (accessed September 3, 2014).
24 John Carswell, Government and the Universities in Britain: Programme and Performance 1960–1980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 12.
25 Shattock, Making Policy in British Higher Education 1945–2011, 90.
26 BIS, Higher Education: Students at the Heart of the System CM 8122. (London: Stationery Office, June 2011).
27 CVCP, paper by Noel Annan, CVCP special meeting, October 2–3, 1970 Vol. 30 MSS 399/1/30, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick.
28 Graeme Moodie and Rowland Eustace, Power and Authority in British Universities (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974), 233.
29 CVCP, Report of the Steering Committee for Efficiency Studies in Universities (the Jarratt Report) (London: CVCP, 1985), paragraph 5.5.
30 Rosemary Deem, Sam Hillyard and Mike Reed, Knowledge, Higher Education and the New Managerialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
31 Henkel, Academic Identities and Policy Change in Higher Education.
32 Ibid., 144.
33 Ibid., 227.
34 Locke and Bennion, ‘The United Kingdom: Academic Retreat or Professional Renewal’.
35 Ibid.
36 Peter Williams, The Result of Intelligent Effort: Two Decades in the Quality Assurance of Higher Education (London: Institute of Education, 2009).
37 Mary Henkel, ‘Changes in the Governance and Management of the University: The Role of Governments and Third Party Agents’, in Changing Governance in Higher Education: Incorporation, Marketisation and Other Reforms – A Comparative Study (Hiroshima: COE Publications, Hiroshima Research Institute of Higher Education, 2007).
38 Michael Gibbons, ‘Choice and Responsibility: Innovation in a New Context’, Higher Education Management and Policy 17, no. 1 (2005): 9–22.
39 Peter Laslett, The World we have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965).
40 Burton R. Clark, The Academic Life: Small Worlds, Different Worlds (Stanford, CA: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1987), 261–5.