The Global Common Good and the Future of Academic Professionals

Abstract

The status and working conditions of the academic profession worldwide are under strain due to both mass access and budget constraints. While the profession faces different challenges in different regions, the professoriate is confronting significant difficulties everywhere. ... It is possible that up to half of the world's university teachers have only earned a bachelor's degree. In much of the world half the academic staff is close to retirement. There are too few new PhDs produced to replace those leaving the profession. ... In many Latin American countries, up to 80 per cent of the teachers in higher education are employed part-time. ... Moreover, in recent years, a global academic marketplace has developed: academics are internationally mobile. (UNESCO, 2015, p. 56)Can the higher education faculty sustain itself as a profession? And why does this question matter as much as more frequently asked questions regarding access, costs, quality, governance, and competitiveness? Are those who educate-teachers, scholars, and supporters-so different from nation to nation, culture to culture, economy to economy as to preclude any commonality that might underlie a shared profession worldwide? This special issue of Higher Learning Research Communications seeks to address these questions by posing as a unifying concept the academic profession's duty to the common good. It is a duty that of necessity and of increasing urgency transcends borders and boundaries of every kind.The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) warns that the world's population of teachers, including postsecondary teachers, faces daunting challenges and limitations, which may hamper the world's ability to ensure opportunity and sustainability for humanity (2015). Education is a central avenue by which nations and people seek to improve the status of the collective, just as they use it for more self-interested purposes. Elementary and secondary schooling are the baseline for individual and societal wellbeing-as reflected in the United Nations' (UN) Millennium Development Goals, which called for achieving universal primary education by 2015. Higher education is essential for creating the advanced knowledge and human capital necessary to address the world's most challenging issues, ranging from the environment to health to security to societal stability with such immediate crises as drought and climate change, terrorism, migration, famine, and health epidemics.While enormous progress was made in achieving the UN's 2015 goal, especially in expanding access to education for girls and women at primary and secondary levels, the necessity of greatly enhanced education is now universally recognized as essential to global progress, equity, and justice. The 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals step up the expectations for education, calling forinclusive and equitable quality education at all levels - early childhood, primary, secondary, tertiary, technical and vocational training. All people, irrespective of sex, age, race or ethnicity, and persons with disabilities, migrants, indigenous peoples, children and youth, especially those in vulnerable situations, should have access to life-long learning opportunities that help them to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to exploit opportunities and to participate fully in society. (United Nations General Assembly, p. 7)In an era of unprecedented social disruption and migration, the challenges facing higher education are daunting with unforeseeable long-term consequences.Postsecondary education provides the advanced knowledge that, most often, allows for innovation and improvements to the quality of life for groups (cultural, political, religious, economic, or geographic) as well as the whole-whether a nation, a region, or the world. The structures needed to provide education and training are bound by a common need for personnel to deliver the content, engage the students, conduct the research, and administer the organizations. …