Emergent spaces: Looking for the civic and the civil in initial professional education

Julie Allan*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

The role of the academic within universities has become increasingly constrained by the ‘audit culture’ (Strathern 1997: 305), what they write and for whom is more closely circumscribed than ever before, and the pressure to demonstrate ‘impact’, whatever that may be, limits their capacity to have any real influence on communities and on their values. Halsey (1992: 258) bemoans the ‘decline of the donnish dominion’, while Furedi (2004: Vii) wonders ‘where have all the intellectuals gone?’ The undermining of academic culture and autonomy (Paterson 2003) and the regulatory practices within universities is ‘producing fear and little else’ (Evans 2004: 63) and is ‘killing thinking’ (ibid.) and, as Lyotard (1986) notes, in a world in which success is equated with saving time, thinking itself reveals its fundamental flaw to be its capacity to waste time. Edward Said (1994: 55) argues that a further danger for the intellectual comes from the limitations and constraints of professionalism which encourage conformity rather than critique: The particular threat to the intellectual today, whether in the West or the nonWestern world, is not the academy, nor the suburbs, not the appalling commercialism of journalism and publishing houses, but rather an attitude that I will call professionalism. By professionalism I mean thinking of your work as an intellectual as something you do for a living, between the hours of nine and five with one eye on the clock, and another cocked at what is considered to be proper, professional behaviour – not rocking the boat, not straying outside the accepted paradigms or limits, making yourself marketable and above all presentable, hence uncontroversial and unpolitical and ‘objective’.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Transformation of Children's Services
Subtitle of host publicationExamining and Debating the Complexities of Inter/Professional Working
PublisherTaylor and Francis
Pages141-153
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9781136735998
ISBN (Print)9780415618496
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2011

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2012 for selection and editorial matter Joan Forbes and Cate Watson; individual chapters, the contributors.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Social Sciences
  • General Health Professions
  • General Medicine

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