Becoming An Academic

Sometimes one goes to a lecture having read an abstract and the speaker comes out with a totally different opinion to the one you expected.  This happened on Friday when I heard Prof Bruce Macfarlane talk about ‘Academic citizenship and the hollowing out of academic life.’  Now glancing at his abstract I thought he was criticising the 'upskilling professional support staff and de-skilling of academics' from the perspective that support staff aren't capable of doing an academic's job something I regularly come across in my employment and somewhat disagree with.  His actual argument was that academics not undertaking their support roles (from personal tutoring to academic skills development, from mentoring colleagues to peer-reviewing) undermines the academic community as they are not engaging in a 'service' aspect to their role.  Which was a relief as I can agree with that argument somewhat.  However, there are 3 issues I have with it:

(1) It promote an overly romanticised view of academia where academics were kind, interested in their students general development and about playing a full role as an 'academic citizen'.  Now the 'Blogging Don' Mary Beard wrote on a subject aligned to this a couple of weeks ago.  This argument that the unstructured, informal systems were better misses the students (like my parents) who were lost and forgotten at university.  They passed but the academic experience could have been stronger which is where professionals come in.  Also, a different type and level of service is required when students are paying more for their education. 

(2) It questions, for me, the role of institutions which do both research and teaching/learning.  Some countries separate 'research' into separate institutions to those who do 'teaching'; this is common in America, affected the Dutch institution in my Erasmus Mundus consortium (though they are increasing their research profile), means Teacher Training cannot be in Universities in Austria but is rare in the UK.  I asked about this and his response was that although focusing on teaching would improve the 'service' element, it might weaken the teaching as it might be less up-to-date and would not involve teachers who themselves were still learning. 

(3) I actually see convergence with more academic staff (and more 'service' staff for that matter) taking on work which is more administrative and the actual way to progress is holding both sets of skills.  Young researchers can use this as a way up and I think is helping us move towards a more professional Higher Education Sector. 

Therefore, two lessons have been learnt.  Firstly, not to pre-judge an academic's argument and, secondly, to question the role I want research, teaching & 'service' should play in my career.