Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Emergence of a ‘Graduate Generation’
- 2 The Rise of Student Choice, and the Decline of Academic Autonomy
- 3 Generational Expectations and Experiences of Higher Education
- 4 The Changing Role of the Academic
- 5 A Mental Health ‘Crisis’?
- 6 Growing Up, Moving On? University and the Transition to Adulthood
- 7 Conclusion: The Generational Responsibility of the University
- References
- Index
4 - The Changing Role of the Academic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 February 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction: The Emergence of a ‘Graduate Generation’
- 2 The Rise of Student Choice, and the Decline of Academic Autonomy
- 3 Generational Expectations and Experiences of Higher Education
- 4 The Changing Role of the Academic
- 5 A Mental Health ‘Crisis’?
- 6 Growing Up, Moving On? University and the Transition to Adulthood
- 7 Conclusion: The Generational Responsibility of the University
- References
- Index
Summary
Introduction
In his review of the 2015 government consultation document Fulfilling Our Potential: Teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice (BIS, 2015), Collini (2016) describes how the idea of both the student and the academic has been re-shaped. In the recent past, governments often talked about students as problematic radicals, who ‘ “sponged off” society when they weren't “disrupting” it’. In today's policy script, he argues, ‘students have come to be regarded as a disruptive force in a different sense, the shock-troops of market forces, storming those bastions of pre-commercial values, the universities’. The focus of suspicion and restraint, meanwhile, has become academics: ‘who, unless kept to the mark by constant assessments and targets, will revert to type as feather-bedded, professional-class spongers’. Collini writes:
A curious inversion has taken place whereby academics now occupy the demonised role formerly assigned to students, who must now be defended in their efforts to obtain ‘value for money’. (Collini, 2016)
In this context, it is unsurprising that academics experience the needs and desires of the ‘student consumer’ as having a major impact on their practice, and their professional identity. To remain viable in an increasingly competitive market, Universities have adopted methods of self-regulation to comply with external benchmarks of quality (Fanghanel, 2011). An academic's value is increasingly judged by their capacity to produce appropriate outputs within limited frameworks and timelines (Archer, 2008): as evidenced by the architecture of the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF), and the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF).
Ostensibly, academics enjoy considerable autonomy in the workplace: they master their own discipline, design their own curricula, choose their own topics for intellectual and empirical enquiry (subject to securing funding), and have significant control over their working practices. Yet, in 1975, Marie Haug predicted the ‘deprofessionalisation of everyone’ and the widespread diminution of professional power and authority over clients. A large body of literature has examined the deprofessionalisation of teaching, medicine, and law (Freidson, 1984, 1985, 1988; Reed and Evans, 1987; Ritzer and Walczak 1988; Anleu, 1992; Brooks, 2011).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Generational Encounters with Higher EducationThe Academic-Student Relationship and the University Experience, pp. 71 - 90Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2020