There is a shift in the language of higher education from the word “academic” to the word “researcher”. As the following note will attempt to make clear, this shift reflects yet another expression of a growing intolerance for ambiguity - the organic ambiguity which characterizes culture as a healthy expression of human activity.
“Academic” is a useful term for anyone engaged by a university faculty in ways which bring them into close contact with the core faculty activities of research and teaching. Academics come in many different shapes and sizes, and being an academic may best be described as a professional profile.
Direct employment by a faculty is not in itself a necessary criterion. At Oxford and Cambridge, for example, much of the actual teaching is done in small groups outside of the faculty. The tutors or supervisors who deliver this teaching are not necessarily affiliated with any faculty, and are paid for by the colleges (administrative units which together with the faculties form the university as a corporate entity). University library professionals often also share an academic profile, depending on how closely their work brings them to the fundamental work of teaching and research which form the raison d’être of the faculty.
Nor can academics be simply defined in opposition to a university’s administrative or support staff, since many workers with an academic profile are also expected to fulfil administrative work divorced from either teaching or research, or to take turns serving on the boards and committees which make the faculty world go round.
Finally, being an academic is not simply a question of holding a PhD and being called “Dr.”. Many with a doctorate never set foot in a university again, and many who teach at university (especially among adjuncts, who carry the brunt of teaching at many institutions) are, with a masters degree, amply qualified to inspire and instruct.
So: being a direct employee of a faculty, holding a certain title (professor, adjunct, assistant professor, associate professor, lecturer, etc.), or even a certain degree are none of them either necessary nor sufficient criteria for being an academic. What emerges as necessary is a professional profile that unites proximity to teaching and research at a (proximately) tertiary educational level.
(the term “researcher” thus isolates just part of the meaning of the word “academic”. Part of its rhetorical appeal is that the researcher is a problem solver: the activity is inspired by and responds to “societal problems” in clearcut, empirical ways. What has been cut out/off, isolated, discarded? My contention: not simply the teacher, but the teacher as troublemaker, in opposition to the researcher as problem solver. I use the word troublemaker ironically to emphasize the necessarily troubling role of the pedagogue. True pedagogy moreover does not divide teaching and research but combines the two always - Socrates was learning at the same time as encouraging learning in others, and was executed as a troublemaker. The loss of disinterested, open-ended enquiry in a way that involves the formation of students is itself a societal problem. We must struggle not only against external capitalistic pressures, but also against internal and even personal forces of intellectual pride coupled with insecurity. Let pride and responsibility be our watchwords, perhaps. In any event, the race for funding is distracting us from the work of the academic.)
(tbc)
Some texts out of order:
Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society, 1979 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970 Neil Postman & Charles Weingartner, Teaching as a Subversive Activity, 1971 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994 bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, 2004 Jacques Rancière, Le maître ignorant : cinq leçons sur l’émancipation intellectuelle, 2004 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1943 Mary Harrington, ‘Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good’, NY Times, July 2025
