The "True Professional Ideal" in America. A History.

Every scholar of the professions must now respond in some fashion to the debunking of professionalism that entered the mainstream of social theory durin the 1970s. This critique recognized that the process granting more privilege an higher status to some forms of work than to others is determined more by factor of class, race and gender than by professional levels of knowledge or commitmen to the public good. Yet a model linking professional development solely to capitalist, racist and patriarchial imperatives is insufficient. Two recent books address this analytical tension in very different ways.

Historian Samuel Haber argues that American professions are rooted in a quest for the honor and authority extended to English gentlemen. His superbly researched narrative first examines the clerical, medical and legal professions from 1750-1830, when they established their gentlemanly rights to dignity and authority. As presumed agents of constitutional justice, lawyers profited most in this period. The egalitarian attack on professionalism from 1830-1880 is presented through a thorough study of events in Memphis and Cincinnati. Professionals countered the forces of evangelical religion, market capitalism and political democracy through civic service and through partial acceptance of public criticism of expert authority. Reestablishment of professional stratification marked the period from 1880-1900. Medicine replaced law as the preeminent profession. New York City became the economic capital. Engineers and college professors laid claim to professional status. Throughout this thoughtfu study, Haber outlines how professionals managed to maintain their distinction from workers and tradesmen.

This work skillfully portrays the tangle of contingent forces that influence historical process. Haber recognizes the depth of professional hypocrisy and arrogance. But he concludes that the professional quest for "honor"--work with high social purpose and relative freedom from supervision--does establish a precedent for escape from the alienated labor, uncertain markets or deadening bureaucracies that trap most workers. He pays little attention to the development of the feminized professions, or to the crusades led by established professionals to block females and racial minorities from realization of professional "honor."

Bruce A. Kimball, in the department of education at the University of Rochester covers much the same era as Haber, but reaches very different conclusions. Many historians will find Kimball's thesis to be poorly supported by generalizations so broad that they lose meaningful purpose. For example, Kimball centers much o his analysis on showing how episodic changes in the meaning of the word "profession," and its cognates, correspond to changes in the nature of dominant cultural ideals and changes in the preeminent vocation that upheld those ideals While the etymology of "profession" is certainly fascinating and useful, few historians would agree that historical cause and effect can be so easily determined. Nor would most historians argue that knowing that during the period from 1600-1770 the probable extension of "profession" from referring to a religious vow to signifying the group of people who made the vow opens importan new paths of understanding, especially when the actual time, place and type of rhetorical change are so difficult to discover or connect.

Kimball links the rhetoric of profession and the changing status of the dominan profession during any specific period to that period's particular "architechtonic." This word is Kimball's substitute for "cultural hegemony," th phrase commonly used today to express the same thought. Through 300 pages of small print, the reader thus learns that clerics and the ideal of religion are preeminent from 1600 through the mid-eighteenth century, lawyers and the ideal of polity through the 1870s, and male educators and the ideal of science throug the 1910s. Only the last in the trio differs from the usual interpretation of professional development in the United States. Kimball's elevation of male educators rests upon the relatively high salaries of some in this period, as well as upon his claim that since the 1960s the historiography of the professions has been shaped by historians who hold a presentist, self-serving and overly critical view of the educational profession.

By contrast, Haber argues that college teaching and engineering developed in th late 1890s as professions of subordinates. He shows how the power held by trustees and college presidents greatly circumscribed the professor's dominion. Although Kimball's work is noteworthy for its comparative material on professional salaries since the seventeenth century, Kimball gives little consideration to issues of class and control. The careful research and solid conclusions presented in Haber's book, however, will make it required reading for scholars in the field.

Dee Garrison Rutgers University