It’s the nobility of the job that matters

THE honour and pride of becoming an academic at university is one of the factors some business professionals and practitioners leave the industry to assume the role of an academic.

This finding stood out among the 31 former business practitioners, participants in my PhD research, who had left the industry to pursue an academic career across various universities in Malaysia.

Nobility has been associated with higher education from the time universities were established centuries ago.

A university is sometimes defined as a community of scholars that serve the noble idea of academic autonomy.

As a concept, academic autonomy is generally associated with the first university in the occidental world, the University of Bologna, which evolved in the Italian city of Bologna in the 11th century.

The University of Bologna, however, adopted an “academic charter”, which guaranteed the unhindered pursuit of education. In the classic book, The Ideal of a University by Cardinal J. H. Newman, the meaning and objective of university training is stipulated as:

raising the intellectual tones of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying the true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspirations, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political powers, and refining the intercourse of private life.

University is the institution of knowledge production, creation, assimilation, dissemination, application, and accumulation with noble values and integrity and, as such, is a complex entity.

Accordingly, working or pursuing a career at university is perceived to be a noble career, especially by those who transition from industry to academia.

Nonetheless, today’s university has evolved into a highly complex institution.

This change is brought about, in part, through its own growth as well as external influences.

Numerous studies reveal that globalisation, advancement in information and communication technology, empowered consumers and societies, national agenda, as well as economic policies have shaped the identity and function of university.

According to these studies, the university has gone beyond its original role of academic autonomy.

In Malaysia, the nobility of higher education is now a growing concern among some academic leaders and scholars –- in particular, the negative impact of liberalisation, internationalisation, and the “ranking game” affecting academia.

Some scholars are concerned about the continuity of the soul or humanity of higher education.

Accordingly, this leads to the issue of sustaining the nobility of an academic career.

There are academic leaders who advocate a philosophy of education that centres on principles such as “touching the lives of ordinary people”, engaging in “authentic scholarship”, being a “mirror of humanity’s great heritage”, and “building lives and characters”.

Taken together, these principles convey a historical understanding and cultural expectation regarding the nobility of higher education.

This appears to have become a topic of current debate, especially in view of the ongoing marketisation and the related managerialism in higher education worldwide.

However, in my research, the perceived nobility of being an academic, as opposed to being a business executive, finds expression in the narratives of several participants at one to one interviews or in focus group discussions.

Their perception of nobility has the associated dimension of altruism. Altruism represents a belief and practice of making a contribution to others without expecting anything in return, a noble deed, indeed.

Associated with this is the positive feeling of being of some value to others and an experience of a noble, virtuous life. This kind of positive feeling is similar to what is called “eudemonic well-being”.

From the narratives of the participants, I can discern that some experience eudemonic well-being through their perceived contribution to higher education, perceived transformation of their students, and also perceived helpfulness to their students.

I have conceptualised this feeling of well-being as altruism within the category of nobility of an academic career.

In this research, I included a select group of participants. They were all former senior executives from the corporate world.

After gaining considerable experience in the corporate world, they had opted for an academic career in Malaysian business schools.

The increasing importance and emergence of social corporate responsibility is testament to the sense of social responsibility, exhibited by corporate leaders of industry.

Indeed, some of the participants expressed that their entry into academia is a form of personal social responsibility in terms of “giving back to society”.

I am not implying that academics who were not from industry do not have a sense of nobility.

Indeed, many participants in my research expressed gratitude for the collegiality and support rendered to them by their academic colleagues.

Some participants cited the noble work of academics as a reason for entering academia.

The significance of the sense of nobility is that it acts as a motivator in sustaining an academic career in the current era of increasing ingress of corporatisation of higher education institutions.

For the academics who persevere in their career in this challenging times, the nobility of their career acts as a beacon of light in the alignment of one’s career with one’s heart: there is congruence between one’s career and one’s noble values, competency, talent, and interests.

The writer is a lecturer with the Faculty of Business and Design at Swinburne University of Technology Sarawak Campus, Kuching.