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

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’.