The Academic Profession

“The professoriate has become a large and complex profession—with at least 3.5 million professionals involved in postsecondary teaching worldwide, serving more than 80 million students (Task Force on Higher Education and Society, 2000). The professoriate is at the heart of the academic enterprise. Without a committed faculty, no university can be successful nor can effective teaching and learning take place. Yet, despite the great presence of higher education in the technological world of the 21st century, the academic profession finds itself under increasing pressure. Working conditions have deteriorated at the same time that traditional autonomy has diminished. Increased enrollments have not been accompanied by commensurate growth in faculty appoints or salaries. At present, there are unprecedented changes taking place in the terms of appointment, working conditions, and management of the academic profession.”

Philip G. Altbach
“The Deterioration of the Academic Estate: International Patterns of Academic Work”
In The Changing Academic Workplace: Comparative Perspectives (2000)

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“The academic workplace and the university professor, as they are known in the West, represent recent phenomena in Arab societies, particularly in the Gulf states. The emergence of the contemporary Arab university (jami’a)—as well as the notion of the Islamic university—and the role of the university professor (ustaz), represent cultural products associated with the Western colonial encounter with Arab societies and the expansion of Western higher education systems. In this sense, the contemporary Arab academic workplace differs from earlier institutional models of knowledge formulation and transmission as they were historically and socially experienced in Arab and Muslim societies…

The contemporary academic workplace, as an organizational context and space of practice, introduced new paradigms of knowledge into Arab societies. By the same token, it triggered new political realities and power struggles, gender and class based…

… the Gulf academic workplace is challenged simultaneously by both local and regional sociopolitical constraints and increasingly globalized markets and international migratory flows. Yet, the ultimate outcomes of these processes are far from converging toward a uniform organizational pattern of the academic workplace. Rather, an array of diverging institutional formations may be clearly identified…

The Gulf academic workplace may thus be conceived as a ‘site’ producing a myriad of hybrid organizational and institutional arrangements”

André Elias Mazawi
“The Academic Workplace in Public Arab Gulf Universities”
In The Decline of the Guru: The Academic Profession in Developing and Middle-Income Countries (2003)