Is Professionalism in Teaching a Form of Control?

When a university teacher is told to follow a standardized curriculum, submit performance reports, meet student satisfaction scores, and align their research with institutional targets – all in the name of being “professional” – a critical question arises: is professionalism genuinely about quality, or has it become a mechanism for controlling what teachers do, think, and teach? This is not a fringe concern. It sits at the centre of one of the most important debates in higher education today – the tension between professionalism as an empowering ideal and professionalism as an instrument of institutional and state control.

What do we mean by professionalism in teaching?
The debate on professionalism: autonomy vs. managerial oversight
Professionalism as a disciplinary mechanism
The role of governments and institutions: who controls the academic profession?
The impact on academic freedom and teacher identity
Finding a middle ground: how teachers can retain independence while being accountable
Shared governance and professional agency
Reclaiming the ethical core of teaching

What do we mean by professionalism in teaching?

Professionalism is not a neutral term. It carries different meanings depending on who is using it and why. At its most basic, the concept draws on the idea of an occupation that controls its own work, organized around a distinct body of knowledge and a commitment to service. This is the traditional understanding of a profession – one where the practitioner’s expertise governs their practice. In teaching, this would mean that a university teacher decides what to teach, how to teach it, and how to assess their students, guided by their scholarly knowledge and ethical commitment to learning.

But as scholars of teacher professionalism have long argued, this picture rarely holds in practice. Teaching has historically been described as a “semi-profession” – one in which practitioners are directed to perform to certain standards set by their superiors, limiting individual autonomy and decision-making powers. The very standards and frameworks that present themselves as markers of professional identity are, in this reading, constraints dressed in respectable language.

The debate on professionalism: autonomy vs. managerial oversight

The central fault line in the professionalism debate is between two competing visions: professionalism as occupational autonomy and professionalism as organizational control. Sociologist Julia Evetts captures this distinction clearly – occupational professionalism is grounded in collegial authority and professional discretion, while organizational professionalism functions as a discourse of occupational change and managerial control, characterized by hierarchical structures, standardized procedures, and performance targets.

The shift from the first to the second has been dramatic. Since the 1980s, universities have been pressured to adopt commercial models that emphasize knowledge commercialization, employability skills, outcome-based curriculum, and corporate management structures. The consequences for teachers have been profound. Market-driven education often subordinates educational values to commercial goals, eroding the standards of higher education and undermining the professional ideologies educators have built their practice around.

Philosopher and education scholar Stephen Ball described this transformation in his influential work on performativity and new managerialism. He argued that NPM-style (New Public Management) external pressures have fundamentally reshaped what it means to be a teaching professional, installing a culture of competitive performance through a combination of targets, appraisals, and incentives. The language of education has itself shifted – teachers have become “human resources,” learning has been reframed as a “cost-effective policy outcome,” and student achievement is measured through “productivity targets.” In this environment, professionalism becomes less about the teacher’s own ethical judgment and more about performing for external evaluators.

Critics like Henry Giroux and Michael Apple have pushed this argument further, contending that such administrative approaches undermine teachers’ autonomy and hinder their ability to innovate, promote critical engagement, and support deeper learning. When teachers are primarily accountable to performance metrics rather than to the intellectual and developmental needs of their students, the transformative potential of higher education is hollowed out.

Professionalism as a disciplinary mechanism

What makes professionalism particularly effective as a form of control is that it is largely self-enforcing. Teachers internalize the norms associated with being “professional” – punctuality, measurable output, compliance with institutional policy – and regulate themselves accordingly. Sociologist Valerie Fournier’s analysis of professionalism as a disciplinary mechanism highlights precisely this: the appeal to professionalism disciplines individuals by encouraging them to self-monitor against normative standards. The result is a form of control that does not require direct coercion because teachers themselves become the agents of their own surveillance.

Scholar Thomas Popkewitz traced this dynamic to the early twentieth century, showing how the discussion about professionalism has moved toward rationalizing and controlling teachers’ pedagogical knowledge through strategies derived from educational research and state policy. What appears to be a discourse of professional improvement is simultaneously a discourse of governing – shaping not just what teachers do, but how they think about their role.

The result, as Ball observed, can produce what he called “values schizophrenia” – a painful conflict between teachers’ commitment to their students and the pressure to perform well against institutional metrics. Performative discourses deny the emotional and caring dimensions of teaching, undermine teacher identity, and reduce the meaning of work to measurable outputs.

The role of governments and institutions: who controls the academic profession?

Governments and institutions exercise control over the academic profession through multiple channels – funding, accreditation, legislation, performance frameworks, and governance structures. The Association of American Universities defines institutional autonomy as the right of a university to determine for itself who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study. In principle, this autonomy protects teachers. In practice, the relationship is more complicated.

Public universities are funded by the state, and with that funding comes scrutiny. Higher education everywhere faces challenges from governmental authoritarianism on one hand, and internal accountability demands on the other. Governments have revised and restructured higher education institutions in numerous countries, pushing them to redirect research and enrolment toward state-defined priorities. In the United States, standardized testing for teachers and students created pressure toward national convergence and federal oversight. In South Korea, reforms introduced accreditation systems and national-level certification controls specifically designed to increase central government oversight over teachers and teacher education.

At the institutional level, the rise of new managerialism has introduced layers of oversight that did not previously exist. When trustees act as direct agents of external ideology rather than guardians of institutional mission, universities risk becoming battlegrounds rather than centers of learning. The professionalisation of management within universities – the appointment of administrators with business-sector backgrounds, the introduction of performance dashboards, the audit of teaching through student evaluations – has shifted power decisively away from academic staff.

The distinction between professionalisation “from above” and “from within” is instructive here. Professionalisation from above is employed to convince professionals to perform in ways seen as appropriate and effective by institutional authorities, while professionalisation from within emerges when a profession itself uses normative standards to construct an identity that secures its own autonomy. The problem is that in contemporary higher education, the “from above” version has become dominant.

The impact on academic freedom and teacher identity

The consequences for academic freedom are real. As external pressures on teacher education programs mount, institutions and their faculty face difficult questions about how to respond to calls for increased accountability that come at the cost of diminished autonomy. Contingent contracts – which now account for the majority of academic positions in some countries – further erode the power of individual teachers to resist institutional demands. In the United States, approximately 63% of faculty were on contingent contracts as of 2019, with only about 26.5% holding tenured positions. A teacher on a short-term contract is unlikely to challenge institutional norms, regardless of their professional convictions.

Finding a middle ground: how teachers can retain independence while being accountable

The debate is not simply about choosing between accountability and autonomy as if they were mutually exclusive. The evidence suggests that both matter – and that the way they are combined determines whether professionalism is empowering or constraining. Educational systems with higher levels of pedagogical autonomy tend to be more effective and equitable. Research using PISA data shows that when pedagogical autonomy translates into greater teacher involvement in decision-making processes, it is associated with higher student performance.

The Montreal Economic Institute’s research on pedagogical autonomy makes a clear case: giving teachers genuine control over content and teaching methods – while making them accountable for the consequences of those decisions – produces better academic outcomes than centralized prescription. The key is that accountability must be tied to professional judgment, not substituted for it. Bureaucratic prior approval of every curricular decision does not enhance quality; it throttles the professional capacity to respond to students’ real needs.

Shared governance and professional agency

Shared governance – a model in which faculty, administration, and governing boards each play defined roles in institutional decision-making – offers one structural way to protect teacher autonomy within accountable frameworks. The Association of American Universities emphasizes that shared governance provides the mechanisms to support institutional autonomy by ensuring that multiple voices – including faculty – are integrated into a cohesive institutional vision. Shared governance is not a guarantee of academic freedom, but it creates the conditions under which professional judgment can be exercised without constant fear of reprisal.

At the individual level, teachers can assert professional agency by grounding their practice in evidence and engaging actively with institutional processes. Rather than passively complying with top-down mandates, teachers who participate in curriculum committees, peer review processes, and professional associations contribute to the kind of collegial authority that defines occupational professionalism. Professionalisation from within – where teachers themselves use normative standards to construct a shared professional identity – secures and maintains autonomy and discretionary power in ways that external imposition cannot.

Reclaiming the ethical core of teaching

Ultimately, the antidote to professionalism as ideology of control is a renewed commitment to the ethical foundations of teaching. The American Association of University Professors has long held that academic freedom is not merely a privilege for individual teachers – it is “of transcendent value to all of us,” because the quality of scholarship and teaching that academic freedom makes possible serves society as a whole. Faculty members bear a corresponding responsibility: to maintain the rigor of their scholarly inquiry, to give students the freedom to form independent judgments, and to uphold ethical standards in their academic work.

The challenge for university teachers today is to hold onto this ethical core while navigating the real pressures of institutional life. That means distinguishing between accountability measures that genuinely serve students and the public interest – transparency, peer review, outcome monitoring – and those that primarily serve managerial or commercial agendas. It means being an active participant in governance, not a passive subject of it. And it means recognizing, as the broader literature makes clear, that the tensions between accountability, central control, and autonomy are at the centre of contemporary debates on the regulation of the teaching profession – debates that are far from settled, and in which teachers themselves must have a voice.

What do you think? If professionalism standards are designed partly by the same institutions that benefit from teacher compliance, can they ever be truly objective? And as a teacher or aspiring academic, where do you draw the line between embracing institutional accountability and protecting the independence that makes meaningful education possible?

References

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Table of Contents

What do we mean by professionalism in teaching? 🔗

The debate on professionalism: autonomy vs. managerial oversight 🔗

Professionalism as a disciplinary mechanism 🔗

The role of governments and institutions: who controls the academic profession? 🔗

The impact on academic freedom and teacher identity 🔗

Finding a middle ground: how teachers can retain independence while being accountable 🔗

Shared governance and professional agency 🔗

Reclaiming the ethical core of teaching 🔗