Key challenges to the academic profession

The academic profession all over the world has experienced substantial and rapid changes of its societal, institutional and academic environment. The gradual move towards the knowledge society provided opportunities for a growth of the number of academics but the challenges to reconsider the professional role were by no means without any hardship. The authors of this volume address four areas of key chal-lenges to the academic profession. What do the rising ex-pectations to generate and disseminate relevant knowledge mean: a leap from “scholarship of discovery” to “scholarship of application” or new combinations of discovery with social, economic and cultural implications? How does internation-alisation affect academics: as a step towards a cosmopolitan academic world or as localistic competition on world scale? How does the growing power of institutional management shape the academic role: Does the dependent “knowledge worker” substitute the “republic of scholars”, or is there a new space for academic freedom and responsibility? What does the expansion of graduate education mean: an extension of school-type learning towards the doctorate, or an increased chance of open discourse between senior academics and academics in their formative years? The papers comprised in this volume were presented to a workshop held on 5– 6 September 2006 in Kassel, Germany. It was initiated and supported by the Regional Scientifi c Com-mittee Europe and North America of the UNESCO Forum for Higher Education, Research and Knowledge, jointly prepared with scholars collaborating in the international comparative survey “The Changing Academic Profession” scheduled for 2007, and locally organized by the International Centre for Higher Education Research, University of Kassel. The authors addressed the challenges named both comparatively and with emphasis on the experiences from their countries