Professionalization in the Academy

Academic professionalization, excerpted from Louis Menard's The Marketplace of Ideas. Bookmark: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/11/professionalization-in-academy

Bookmark notes: "The Ph.D. Problem," on the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy's self-renewal:

"[T]he modern academic discipline reproduces all the salient features of the professionalized occupation. It is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. ....Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system.... It is the academic's job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn't want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate..." + pages of comments

Thanks to Kibrolv at Open a Vein for blogging this one (post title, "the octopus") for me to pick up his link on RSS reader, read article, bookmark on NFM bundle and then share here (tweet later too). More bookmarks at http://delicious.com/vcrary/NFM. Blogged via Delicious.com