United Kingdom: an increasingly differentiated profession

One of a selection of twelve country reports written as a contribution to the international Changing Academic Profession study that features over 20 countries. Each chapter addresses the issues of relevance, internationalisation and management and their implications for the academic profession in a particular country. These are: Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Portugal and South Africa, as well as the UK

The Academic Profession: changing roles, terms and definitions

A critical review of a recent report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England on ‘workforce trends’ from the perspectives of the Changing Academic Profession project

The Changing Academic Profession in the UK: Setting the Scene

This research report provides an initial analysis of issues being investigated in a current international study, the Changing Academic Profession, supported by Universities UK and other national higher education bodies. The research is examining the nature and extent of the changes experienced by the academic profession in recent years, the reasons for these changes and their consequences. The report introduces the international and institutional context for the research, including the expansion of higher education, growing demands from government and others, funding constraints, greater global competition and pressures to be more business-like. Academics themselves are becoming more internationalised, entrepreneurial and professionalised and their roles have diversified and often taken them away from their original disciplines towards new forms of identity and loyalty. Against this background, the report outlines current characteristics of the academic profession — ie those who teach and/or research — providing a profile of academics in the UK and describing some of the conditions of academic work. The report focuses on the three main themes being addressed by the study: relevance, internationalisation and management

Introduction

An introduction to the international study of the Changing Academic Profession and the pre-survey reports from twelve of the twenty or so countries participating in the study

The Academic Profession in England: Still stratified after all these years?

This chapter focuses on the findings from the initial analysis of the responses to a survey of nearly 1,700 academics from a wide range of higher education institutions (HEIs) throughout the UK which was carried out by the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information (CHERI) at The Open University. It includes comparisons with findings from the original survey of the academic profession in England in 1992 as part of the First International Survey of the Academic Profession (Fulton, 1996). Therefore, it concentrates on the responses to the 2007 survey from those employed in English HEIs. The 2007 questionnaire repeated 13 items included in the earlier survey. The report of the 1992 survey sought to investigate institutional diversity and differentiation on the eve of the abolition of the binary divide in the UK between universities on the one hand and polytechnics and major colleges of higher education on the other. As such, this initial report of – what amounts to a fraction of – the UK 2007 survey findings, is of an analysis by institutional type utilising three categories: Pre-1992 Universities, Post-1992 Universities (i.e. Polytechnics at the time of the 1992 survey), and Post-2004 Universities and HE Colleges. These analytical categories are also applied to the responses to a selection of other questions in the survey not included in the 1992 instrument

The internationalization of the Polish academic profession. A comparative European approach

The internationalization of the Polish academic profession is studied quantitatively in a comparative European context. A micro-level (individual) approach relying on primary data collected in a consistent, internationally comparable format is used (N = 17 211 cases). The individual academic is the unit of analysis, rather than a national higher education system or an individual institution. The authors\u27 study shows that research productivity of Polish academics (consistent with European patterns) is strongly correlated with international collaboration: the average productivity of Polish academics involved in international collaboration ("internationalists") is consistently higher than that of Polish "locals" in all academic fields. Polish academics are less internationalized in research than the European average but the research productivity of Polish "internationalists" is much higher than that of Polish "locals". The impact of international collaboration on average productivity is much higher in Poland than in the other European countries studied, a finding with important policy implications. (DIPF/Orig.

Academic Freedom in a Changing Academic World

This article considers the academic profession and academic freedom in light of the results of the Changing Academic Profession (CAP) survey in Finland and four other European countries. Academic freedom is examined as a phenomenon that provides a setting for goal determination by members of the academic profession. It has a bearing on both institutional autonomy and individual academic freedom, i.e. the freedom of research and teaching. Academic freedom can be examined on the basis of material from the CAP survey through the questions about the freedom of teaching, the definition of work, working as a member of a community, the power of influence, funding, and the evaluation of quality. The concept of academic freedom varies slightly between countries, in part because of the growth of higher education systems and because of the increasing demand for ‘relevance’ being imposed on universities