Policy, Profession and Person: The Formation of Reflexive Academic Identities in an Irish Institute of Technology

Abstract

It was dependent on the Department of Education for its funding as well as for approval for the majority of its activities, and its graduates received awards from the National Council for Educational Awards (NCEA), which had been established to validate the academic programmes of all non-university higher education institutions in the State. By the time the study began in 2005, the institution had expanded its course portfolio to include ninety-two fUll-time programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level in six academic schools (Business, Education, Engineering, Health Science, Humanities and Science) as well as a significant suite of part-time courses in adult and continuing education and supervision for a growing number of research postgraduates. It had also expanded its activities to include research as well as teaching, actively and strategically engaging with the expanded remit granted to the technological colleges under the 1992 Regional Technical Colleges Act. It had over five and a half thousand full-time students, of whom approximately 4% were pursuing postgraduate studies, and in the region of four thousand part-time students on its register (Waterford Institute of Technology 2(05). It had been removed from the control of the City of Waterford VEC in 1994 and re-<iesignated as Waterford Institute of Technology in 1997. Over a period between 1998 and 2003, it had also been delegated authority by the NCEA's successor, the Higher Education and Training Awards Council (HETAC), to make its own awards to doctoral level in the School of Science and to Masters level in the remaining areas. Operating under the terms of the 1992 Regional Technical Colleges Act and the amendments to this Act, it remained answerable to the Department of Education and Science until 2006, when responsibility for the loTs was transferred to the Higher Education Authority (HEA) under the Institutes of Technology Act. In the same year, as part of a long running regional campaign to secure a university for the South East, WIT made an application for university designation under Section 9 of the Universities Act. At the time of writing (December 2(08), a ministerial decision on whether to proceed with a Section 9 review is still awaited. 10 class, are related to social and historical location. One very strong source of identity for many people is the occupation or profession. Individuals' sense of self is often formed in and shaped by the context in which they work, by the tasks they carry out and the roles they fulfil in their working lives. This is true of any profession, but Kogan et al (2000) argue that the concept of identity 'has been of central, symbolic and instrumental significance in the lives of individual academics' (p.162) and Henkel (2000) claims that 'not only has academic life provided the conditions for strong identities but also the building of strong identities that are, nevertheless, embedded in defined communities, has been central to the dynamic of academic life in the Western world' (p.l3). Whether it is possibl...