Towards a New Academic Professionalism: A manifesto of hope

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate debate on developments within higher education. It is concerned primarily with the hopeful working out of a new kind of professional ethic. It explores the extent to which and ways in which academic staff working within the context of higher education might be seen as professionals with a shared set of values and expectations. It argues that the changing conditions of higher education have made it extremely difficult to speak of academic workers as a unified 'profession'. Moreover, the stratification of higher education has led to increased and deepening divisions of labour, within which academic workers have become increasingly isolated, while also becoming increasingly accountable. The only way out of this impasse, it is argued, is for academics to re-define their professionalism in terms of their underlying commitments and purposes. That task of re-definition is discussed in terms of a distinction between two competing notions of academic freedom: the traditional notion of academic freedom as freedom for academics, and an emergent notion of academic freedom as freedom for others. It is with reference to that emergent notion that this article speculates upon the possibility of a new professionalism for higher education, while recognising that a new professionalism of this kind would be deeply at odds with the prevailing managerialism of higher education as manifest in its quality-control mechanisms, accountability procedures, and planned systems of professional accreditation.