Case Method and Pluralist Economics by Kavous Ardalan

Author:Kavous Ardalan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

2 Case Methodology and Preference for College-Like Institution

Starting in the second half of the nineteenth century, the higher education has experienced the rise to dominance of the academic profession and of the university as its principal institutional expression. The university rose in the nineteenth century and succeeded in the twentieth century. It involved the professionalization of academic life that promoted the research scholar and the research university to domination in higher education. This “academic revolution” influenced all institutions, including those designed to avoid its impact.

This “academic revolution” reflected professionalism as the dominant cultural and organizational concept in higher education. However, such professionalism has its strengths and weaknesses. Since the inception of the professionalization of higher education, there have been movements, such as “general education,” that sought to expose these weaknesses and to promote alternative conception of professionalism with much different implications for curricula, faculty-student relationships, and the nature of faculty work and faculty careers.

The general education movement reached its peak during the 1930–1945 period. Its insights and principles constituted the bases for many curricular reforms and founding of new colleges in the 1960s. Colleges, such as Hampshire, Ramapo, Santa Cruz, Evergreen, and New College, came to being in the attempt to resurrect these principles and give them new meaning.

Hampshire College, for instance, was created to challenge, but not abolish, the dominant definition and forms of professionalism in higher education. It was consciously created to become a distinctive liberal arts college that opposed the influence of graduate and professional schools on undergraduate liberal arts education. It intended to avoid the extremes of “hierarchy and equalitarianism” or “specialization and freedom of choice.” In this way, Hampshire College becomes a useful case study of an alternative conception of professionalism and its implications for curricular issues, student-faculty interactions, and the nature of academic work.

Professionalism started during the second half of the nineteenth century and took over law, medicine, and university teaching. Professionalization changed these occupations. More specifically, it changed their nature and underlying values that governed their practice, defined their status, and regulated their accessibility to new members. In this context, “Professional” meant someone who had gone through a difficult and long process to master an esoteric, but useful body of systematic knowledge; and had been theoretically trained before entering an apprenticeship or a practice; and had received a degree or license from a recognized institution. A “practitioner professional” meant someone with technical competence, superior skill, and a high quality of performance. “Professionals” referred to people who intended to serve some higher purpose rather than their personal gain; and who had developed codes of behavior and mechanisms of enforcement in order to ensure their ethos of service.

Professionals were given authority based on their expertise in some esoteric body of knowledge. They were given autonomy over setting standards of performance. They were given power to have control over the selection, training, and quality of new members. The culture of professionalism required amateurs to trust the integrity of trained persons, whose power was to be regarded as sacred and charismatic.

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