ABSTRACT
In Homo Academicus, his study of French academic society, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu insists that the academic or professional scholar has an obligation to self-scrutinize. Such scrutiny is necessary, he says, because academic research “has been socially licensed as entitled to operate as objectication which lays claim to objectivity and universality” (xii). Academics don’t just happen to feel removed from the things we investigate, asserts Bourdieu; we are positioned that way by our training and credentialing. Burton Bledstein makes a similar observation in The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America. Literary scholars professionalized in the late nineteenth century, Bledstein reminds us, around the same time as other academics as well as professional types like doctors and lawyers. Ever since, we’ve been busy asserting our autonomy and naturalizing our practices. We tend to think of ourselves as especially sensitive to cultural ideology and practice, since we research these things. But when it comes to prizing, we are not only observers. We are also practitioners and even champions.
