Abstract

“Planet Earth under peril” is what we are inundated every day by news media; with several major global changes that have occurred in the last two decades with global warming, environmental depletion of natural resources, food crises, the epidemic of HIV/AIDS, terrorism, cyber crimes and mass genocides in the 21st century. The question is how higher education can play a key role in providing solutions to these issues, which are impacting humanity today and will continue to wreak havoc, and have unprecedented impact on the future generation. According to Giroux’s (2006) article on “Higher Education Under Siege: Implications of Public Intellectuals”, unfortunately too many academics have retreated into narrow specialisms and do not examine their role in what it means to connect learning to public life and to lessen human suffering. This form of education is where scholars “publish while others perish” (Zinn, 2001). He further argues that most academics write for the scholarly audiences, limited within the narrow walls of a gated community of scholars and do not speak to the larger public. This paper is an attempt by two Professors in America to deconstruct the role of professoriate as defined by the current three criteria of faculty evaluation for retention, tenure and promotion: 1) teaching 2) research and 3) service. The paper will further review the past, the present and the future role of the professoriate in American Universities based on several personal anecdotal experiences and related research and literature. The presenters would further like to extend this discussion to include diverse perspectives and paradigms on the role of the professoriate from the global community of Universities.