The Once and Future Academic

This chapter represents a philosophical and normative rather than an economic and sociological account of what it is like to be a higher education worker in the early twenty-first century. This is not because the latter kind of account does not exist. On the contrary, there are several ongoing surveys of what it is to be a member of the contemporary ‘academic profession’ (see, for example, Locke and Teichler, 2007). Sadly, many of these have been victims of poor conceptualization, of essentially backward-looking empirical categories, and hence of ideological capture.