United Kingdom: an increasingly differentiated profession

One of the interesting experiences of working with the international Changing Academic Profession (CAP) team in the planning of the new survey has been the definitional and terminological difficulties we have encountered. Just who is to count as an ‘academic’ and who not? What term best describes the people we are interested in? In some countries, it seems sufficient to use the term ‘professoriate’ to define the focus of our interests. In other cases, a looser notion of ‘academic staff’ is used, which can cause both concern and some status anxiety to the former group where ‘university staff’ are quite different people from the ‘professoriate’. The adopted term ‘academic profession’ appears to be an acceptable compromise, though we must note that the ‘academic profession’ lacks most of the characteristics ascribed to professions in the literature on the subject. Set within this context, it is interesting to note, therefore, the title of a recent publication from the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The Higher Education Workforce in England: A Framework for the Future (HEFCE, 2006) is intended to be the first annual report on ‘workforce trends in HE’ in England. The production of such a report was at the request of the United Kingdom (UK) Government. So higher education in some countries has a ‘professoriate’ but in England it has a ‘workforce’. What, if anything, are we to make of this difference? In this paper, we shall comment on the three main CAP themes – relevance, internationalization and management – from the UK perspective. First, however, we set out some background characteristics of the ‘academic profession’ in the UK.