Who's afraid of Professors of Practice?

When an online course tells you how to make money from crypto, remember they are making money by selling online courses! Learn from what people do as much as what they say. Teaching is considered a calling. However, it says that if one teaches more than one practice, one has a different calling. So it makes sense to include adequate practice components to the academics in our institutions.

By introducing a new teaching title, ‘Professor of Practice’, the University Grants Commission has formalised the possibility for universities and colleges to hire experts from the industry. Professors of Practice are already present at a few national institutions in India and most abroad. They are also known as practice professors or professors of professional practice.

Universities are knowledge organisations. Professors of Practice can boost their knowledge capital. Practice professors will be engaged in curriculum creation, course design, evaluation, student mentoring and teaching. They are expected to make a more significant difference in skill development, industry interface and experiential learning. Among these are arranging internships, guiding entrepreneurship, mentoring industrial projects, establishing incubation centres, setting up tinkering labs, exploring industry opportunities, educating on the career path, networking with professional communities and increasing the talent pool on the campus.

Fear and facts

The major concern about the Professor of Practice proposal is its potential misuse by distorting eligibility conditions. It is less likely that any good institution will falsify the conditions of expertise of at least 15 years at a senior level in a professional field. No one prohibits any institutions from adding additional filters for such recruitments.

The real issue behind this criticism is the trust deficit in the current institutional structures and not the scheme of Professors of Practice. Withholding reforms fearing misuse is a case of functional fixedness, a cognitive bias. It is a tendency to limit something to the way it is traditionally familiar.

Academics value logic and reasoning, whereas practitioners prefer utility over rigour. Will the values contradict? The fear is, at best, a professional stereotype. Most experts from professional fields go well with academic requirements though some may need tweaking in their pedagogical understanding.

Another criticism is that the ‘Professors of Practice’ will create power asymmetries. In other words, the academics’ intellectual superiority contradicts the practitioner’s experiential dominance. This thinking is another default effect. Exposure to other professional cultures benefits everyone. A few institutions apart, whether the long-protected nature of academia has effectively delivered the claimed rigour is debatable.

Yet another concern is that people outside the field will give undue weightage to Professors of Practice which may harm the profession of academics. This is another case of status-quo bias, where the reference point is kept as public attention, not on the opportunity that the proposal offers. The Professor of Practice appointment is exclusive of the sanctioned strength of faculty in the institution and is meant for a short period of one to three years. It will not adversely affect the career prospects of teachers. Instead, it opens ways for complementary learning.

The above criticisms are unrelated to the enrichment of students. Instead, they focus on the power dynamics of professional groups. Perhaps the only genuine concern is the institutional readiness to implement such practices. No one wants to end up Professors of Practice as ‘accidental academics’ or another set of classroom routines devoid of rigour. Most of the fears of misuse can be addressed by creating a centralised web application for screening and allocation of Professors of Practice.

Student’s future, teacher’s past

Universities have existed for a very long time with similar structures and systems. The idea here is not to over-champion the industries or Professors of Practice but to suggest that academics and pracademics can complement each other and benefit from their shared skills and experience.

We live in times with a social need for experimentation at all levels. Moving across and beyond the traditional classification of careers is a necessity. Therefore, addressing the new challenges in education requires boundary-spanning roles. Whether it is an academic or a Professor of Practice, the guiding principle remains the same. Mathematician Richard Hamming says it well: ‘the teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past’.

(The author is Deputy Secretary, University Grants Commission. Views expressed are personal)