Women Negotiating Life in the Academy by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789811531149
Publisher: Springer Singapore

A Contested Space

Academic work in most universities usually includes a blending of research, teaching, and service, but the people doing this work are often seen as either research-focused or teaching-focused. With the requirement of higher education institutions to become more accountable, senior leaders need not only an academic foundation but also the administrative skills to manage these large complex organizations (McCaffery, 2018). This work of academic professionals being more aligned with the area of service suggests a need for the rethinking and expansion of the traditional parameters of academia.

Management in universities has long had its legitimacy questioned and is often depicted by academics as an irrelevant business practice which has no place in the collegiate environment of the academic world (McCaffery, 2018). Middlehurst and Kennie (1997) foresaw economic shifts and technological developments leading to a range of parallel tracks with management and leadership skills gaining prominence.

The introduction of an increasing number of staff in higher education who fulfill a hybrid of academic and professional roles has caused some higher education institutions to re-enter deliberations about the values and purposes of higher education, elitism versus populism, and the distribution of power. In furthering the exploration of how to recognize academic work, discourse has emerged about who should be included as academic staff and who gets to make those decisions.

In my experience, there appear to be three groups of academic professional staff in higher education who do not fit conventional binary descriptors such as “academic” or “non-academic” categories: (1) staff in traditional research and teaching faculty roles who take on professional leadership roles, (2) staff with academic and professional credentials who take on professional leadership roles having arrived from outside academia and then move to traditional academic positions, and (3) staff with academic and professional credentials who are from outside academia take on professional leadership roles but who are not considered to be academics.

Staff on research and teaching tracks who take on professional leadership roles such as presidents, provosts, deans, and department heads are normally filled by staff who have been in traditional academic roles and have taken on administrative duties as service while still meeting research and teaching benchmarks. The Canadian Association of University Teachers (2016) postulates the reliance on positions that do not involve a full range of academic activities undermines the mission of a post-secondary institution, suggesting all of these positions should contribute to research, teaching and service, and other staff who do not fill traditional academic roles should not be given senior leadership roles. Until recently, staff within professional leadership roles were not provided, nor expected to pursue managerial training; “since any intelligent and educated individual can understand what we say then ipso facto they will automatically be able to manage it” (McCaffery, 2018, p. 5).

Waring (2014) uses the term “knowledge elites” to describe those members of a profession who through career development have moved into the realms of knowledge creation and dissemination, often through university appointments. Some might continue to practice in their professional field but often

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