Academic Profession in Brazil, chapter 1, The Academic Professions

The Academic Profession in Brazil

Simon Schwartzman and Elizabeth Balbachevsky

Universidade de São Paulo

Published in Phillip G. Altabach, ed., The International Academic Profession: Portraits from 14 Countries. Princeton, NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1997.

1. The academic professions

The Carnegie Foundation survey on the professorate starts with the notion that university professors make a distinctive profession, an assumption shared by a growing literature. But what does it mean to say that professors are a profession? To what degree is the professor of pediatrics in a medical school, the researcher in a physics department, and the lecturer in a community college, members of the same profession? Is this concept more than a statistical or administrative classification? How important is it to know whether academics are truly a profession, in general and in specific contexts?

More than the description of a reality, the idea of an "academic profession" corresponds to a model (or an "ideal type" in the Weberian sense) of what to belong to such profession should mean: a common core of competencies and educational background; a concern with research and scholarship; full dedication to work in universities and research institutions, rather than independent professional work in specific fields; involvement with matters of graduate and undergraduate education; and a commitment to the academic profession, above and beyond the institutional context where the academic activities take place.

This ideal type is similar to that of the freestanding liberal professions of law and medicine, but has to compete with two other professional models that are also central to the academic activity in all parts of the world. The first, more typical of European countries, is the professor as a government officer, a member of the public bureaucracy. Like the liberal professional, the civil servant keeps the pride and prestige of a learned profession. He retains his professional identity and the "sprit de corps" which allows him to negotiate, up to some point, the terms and conditions of his work. Rituals of admission and professional practice are strongly enforced, both for education and for professional practice. The professor is not free to decide his career, which has to follow the general rules and procedures of central authorities and complex bureaucracies. But he perceives himself as a public figure, with an intellectual and cultural role to play which goes far beyond that of any free standing professional. He is, to use Fritz Ringer's image, the modern version of the Chinese mandarin.

The other professional model is a direct consequence of the expansion of higher education and the corresponding loss of status of the university professor. In most countries - and this is truer for larger than for smaller societies - higher education became more heterogeneous, with different people looking for different types of education. The socialization of academics through a common secondary education, or at least a uniform state examination, became more difficult to maintain and justify. This common education, and a similar social origin, were the grounds for the long held belief that all sciences and learned professions shared a unified epistemology, to be maintained and expanded by the university^.⁽¹⁾.

Now it is common for professors to see themselves as employees in large institutions, with a job to do and a salary to earn at the end of the month, rather than as a liberal professional, or a member of the intellectual and bureaucratic elite. Instead of a lifelong career, their passage through the academy may be temporary, and, even if it is not, they may be more committed to their specific profession than to the university and its values. This is the breeding ground for a new type of professor, closer to the trade unions than to the learned professions. He works for large organizations, very often controlled by a centralized ministry, which has to account for the proper use of public resources and the delivery of education services in appropriate quantity and time. He responds in kind, getting organized in professional unions, to guarantee his salary, working conditions and benefits. On both sides, there is a strong pressure toward uniform standards and procedures, due process, and clear rules for admission, promotion and payment.

These three ideal types, or models, define the field of possibilities for the organization, values and orientation of academics in a given context⁽²⁾. Little is left of the traditional view of a common epistemology and homogeneous culture of scholarship unifying the academic profession. The relative prevalence of one of the three depends on the way the higher education system is organized, the role and weight of the private and the public sectors, the educational qualifications of professors, their social standing, and the professional and institutional traditions of a country; and it has consequences in terms of how the values and goals that are supposed to preside the academic activities are upheld and implemented. It is against this map of alternatives that we shall examine, in the following, the main traits of the academic profession in Brazil.

Notes

1. The social and cultural origins of the perception of the University and the Academy as unified entities, with capital letters, and sharing a common epistemology, has been stressed by authors such as Clark Kerr, in his well-known introduction to Abraham Flexner's book on American, British and German universities, and Clifford Geertz. The cultural diversity of academic disciplines was pointed out by Tony Becher in his several writings. See Abraham Flexner, Universities: American, English, German (introduction by Clark Kerr), New York, Oxford University Press, 1968; Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge - Further Essays in Interpretive Sociology. New York, Basic Books, 1983; Tony Becher, Academic Tribes and Territories: intellectual enquiry and the cultures of disciplines. Milton Keynes, Society for Research into Higher Education/Open University Press, 1989.

2. In this text, we shall use the words "academics", "professors" and "university teachers" interchangeably. Cross-national variations in the use of these expressions are a further indication of the varying culture of the academic profession. In Brazil, the word 'professor"is used indifferently to refer to anyone who teachers something. The word "academic", on the other hand, is usually restricted to the members of the Academies of Letters, and has a slightly pejorative connotation in common parlance.