ABSTRACT
A more recent conception with quite different implications for the process of education is the ideal of the university as a training camp for the professions. The universities founded in Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries consisted of faculties of law, medicine, and theology; and the first two of these at least remain the leading professional faculties of the present-day university. The ideal of the professional school presupposes the existence of a number of socially defined occupational roles or categories whose characteristics correspond roughly to what we customarily mean by a "profession". The high status of the professions serves as a permanent spur to professionalization of the most diverse occupational roles. The difference between intellectual creation and professional activity is vested in a distinction deeper than that between the professional and the amateur. The conflict between professional certification and intellectual initiation destroys the coherence of graduate education in American universities.
