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High Educ (2013) 66:773776
DOI 10.1007/s10734-013-9665-1
BOOK REVIEW
On being an academic: A review
J. Fanghanel: Being an academic. Routledge, New York, NY, 2012
Megan Callow
Published online: 11 September 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
As a graduate student who studies faculty and who also hopes to one day become one, I have long been interested in academic professionals. Much of my curiosity has been satised in this volume. Jolle Fanghanels Being an Academic captures the academic self in all its complexity, and the research is furthermore couched in an elegantly developed historical and theoretical context.
Fanghanel does not settle for a reductive denition of the identity of the academic, but rather portrays it as a richness that is constructed, relatively uid and inuenced by academics biographies and habitus, their positions within the academic eld and their own ideological beliefs about education (p. 6). The book is a platform for analysis of interviews with 50 faculty participants coming from 20 institutions in 5 countries. However, Fanghanel goes beyond merely giving isolated snapshots; rather, she heeds Higher Education scholar Gary Rhoadess request that researchers of the professoriate spend more time placing these individual faculty within the broader societal contexts in which they work (Rhoades 2007). Fanghanel does this by organizing the books chapters into six main moments of practice that characterize the facultys self and work: faculty as managed professionals, as learning to teach, as having conceptions of students and learning, as practitioners of a discipline, as practitioners of research, and as contributors to an increasingly globalized society.
Fanghanel frames each topic within a discussion about educational ideologies, claiming that academics operate to a large extent according to their values about education. Three ideological categories are identied: education as production, reproduction, or transformation. The production ideology values an instrumental educationa means for students successful placement in the workforce. In addition to a post-Cold War neoliberal atmosphere (Hyslop-Margison and Sears 2006), perennial budget cutting and cost consciousness leads to characterizations of higher education as an investment. Conversely, the reproduction ideology values education for its own sake. An extension of 19th century
M. Callow (&)
Teaching and Learning, Policy and Leadership, University of Maryland, 2311 Benjamin Building, College Park, MD 20901, USAe-mail: [email protected]
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