By Bidgee – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5 au, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12857136
Although Open Learning ’18 has come and gone, the questions and issues linger in my mind. I continue to think about faculty development, and more widely, professional development. I wonder about the routine and damaging separation of skills and content, teaching and research, computers and pedagogy. During the thirteen years I worked in faculty development, as I worked with colleagues to foster deeper and more intellectually stimulating varieties of professional development, I saw organizational and cultural barriers of all kinds; and while I did my best to identify, address, and overcome those barriers, I feel that I failed more often than I succeeded.
Lately I’ve been thinking about how to frame professional development as an ethical project–which of course leads me to think about the ethos of the contemporary university, which is not a happy thinking spot. Still, it’s interesting to think not about programs or outcomes or assessment or any of those useful but secondary things, but about ethos, and ethics. I understand that trying to identify one ethos in the contemporary multiversity is probably a fool’s errand. I wonder, though, if we can talk about ethical higher education without asking about the ethos of the university.
In this regard, I find Jerry Z. Muller’s definition of “the professional ethos” very interesting.
The professional ethos is based on mastery of a body of specialized knowledge acquired through an extended process of education and training; autonomy and control over work; an identification with one’s professional group and a sense of responsibility toward colleagues; a high valuation of intrinsic rewards; and a commitment to the interests of clients above considerations of costs…. (The Tyranny of Metrics)
Mastery. Processes that take time. Self-regulation. Responsibility. Intrinsic rewards. Commitment to the interests of clients (not mere “customers”). It’s hard to think of what professionalism might mean without these commitments. It’s hard to watch such commitments being eroded, or forgotten, or forsaken.
When I hear vapid and damaging talk about how the university is a “business” (as if there’s only one kind of business in the world, the kind focused on making as much money as possible) or about how we need to “give the students what they want, not what we think they need,” I hear a refusal of this idea of the professional ethos.
When smart and perceptive experts feel they must problematize the idea of expertise as what I can only assume is a sincere but misguided egalitarian gesture, I hear a refusal of the idea of the professional ethos. As should be clear by now, putting the word expert in scare quotes can result in a truly frightening and harmful rejection of knowledge itself. To see any part of this rejection in higher education is to see a process of self-consumption that cannot end well.
I wonder if the assumptions underlying much (not all) professional development in contemporary higher education reflect a similar erosion of the professional ethos. Expertise is not simply a quantity or something to be certified. Expertise is a practice emerging from, and reflecting, an ethos. A professional ethos.
Food for thought.
I needed to read this today. Thanks for the kismet moment!
Hi Gardener, I struggle with this too watching a lot of the ethical concerns around OER popping up. I think it is important that we talk about ethics. I have recently gone back into teaching after a long stint in education administration (talk about ethical quagmires!) and working as an adjunct again has been eye-opening to say the least. I am struck by the sentence “an identification with one’s professional group and a sense of responsibility toward colleagues.” Who decides who is and isn’t a colleague? Often adjuncts are over-looked in professional development or in dept. initiatives specifically because they are NOT seen as professionals or as colleagues. I am not posting as a “difficult adjunct,” I just want to point out yet another aspect of university life that is exclusive, classist, and poses very difficult ethical dilemmas. I love listening to professors pontificate on critical pedagogy and social justice when they belong to a union that won’t fight for the health care of fellow teachers!