Jon Nixon

In this chapter I refer to ideal collegial relationships as relationships of virtue and draw on the Aristotelian notion of virtuous friendship to clarify and ground the argument. I also presuppose a heterogeneous category of what I term ‘educational professionals’ that comprises a wide range of occupational groupings. We live in a society that is not only increasingly professionalised, but increasingly pedagogicised: a society, that is, in which professionals in different walks of life and different institutional settings define their professionalism, and mediate their professional practice, in increasingly pedagogical terms. Professionals are now expected to explain, persuade, mediate, consult, negotiate, and learn from, and with, their clients. That is all for the good, but it suggests new forms of collegiality across professional boundaries and new forms of public-professional engagement. It also suggests a renewed sense of intellectual solidarity: the ‘we’ and the ‘us’ that Said had in mind when he refers to ‘scholar-teachers’, carrying forward what he saw as a radical tradition of ‘critical humanism’, or the notion of ‘we scholars’ that Damrosch evoked in his brave attempt to envisage ‘the next intellectuals’.

This paper challenges the view that academic professionalism resides in the professional 'autonomy ' of the academic, the 'self-regulation' of academics as an occupational group, and the differential 'status' of academic workers. This still influential notion of academic professionalism, it is argued, leads to institutional stasis. What is required is greater reflexivity by academics in respect of their underlying professional values. In particular the piece challenges the academic community to re-think academic freedom - the bedrock of professional identity within that community - in terms of increased inclusivity: 'freedom for all' rather than 'freedom for academics'. The paper touches on issues relating to practice and organisational structure, but focuses primarily on the need for academics to shift the moral bases of their claim to professionalism. In so doing, it also challenges the post-Dearing consensus that the debate on academic professionalism can be adequately conducted in terms of 'standards' and 'outcomes'. A prime purpose of the paper is to promote debate and discussion by setting a different kind of agenda and by couching that agenda within a different kind of discourse.

This paper focuses, not on the existing conditions of institutional association, but on hoped-for conditions that would have to be met for professional relationships within higher education to aspire to what Aristotle referred to as ?virtuous friendship?. Such relationships, it is argued, constitute the social content of hope in that they look to new perspectives on institutional renewal and professional regeneration. They provide a context of mutuality and reciprocity within which individuals can begin to realise, through the acquisition of ?functional capabilities?, their particular capacities. The question then arises as to the conditions necessary for generating and sustaining such relationships within the increasingly differentiated and stratified institutional settings of the higher education sector and across an academic workforce that has become fractionalised and atomised around increasingly complex divisions of academic labour. It is that question which this paper seeks to address. ?Civil society is fragile, and it needs to be extended? (Hall, 1995, p. 27)