howard gardner & lee s. shulman the

Whether one sees the professions as ahigh point of human achievement, or, inGeorge Bernard Shaw’s piquant phrase,as a “conspiracy against the laity,” thereis little question that they have played adominant role in industrial and postin-dustrial society since the early twentieth

century. It is dif½cult to envision our erawithout the physicians, lawyers, and ac-countants to whom we turn for help atcrucial times; or the architects and engi-neers who shape the environments inwhich we live; or the journalists andeducators to whom we look for informa-tion, knowledge, and, on occasion, wis-dom.

Some forty years ago, in a Dædalus is-sue devoted entirely to the professions,guest editor Kenneth Lynn declared,“Everywhere in American life, the pro-fessions are triumphant.” He went on to comment, “Given this dramatic situa-tion, it is truly extraordinary how littlewe know about the professions.”

We appear to know much more aboutthe professions now than we did fortyyears ago; certainly there is no paucity of scholarly and popular literature onspeci½c professions, if less on the profes-sions in the aggregate. But the profes-sions themselves have not remained fro-zen over that time. Indeed, they haverecently been subjected to a whole newset of pressures, from the growing reachof new technologies to the growing im-portance of making money.

In recent years, the professions havenot always had good press. Worried byevidence of incompetence and dishon-esty, the general public seems to havelost its uncritical admiration for the pro-

Dædalus Summer 2005 13

Howard Gardner & Lee S. Shulman

The professions in America today:crucial but fragile

Howard Gardner, John H. and Elisabeth A.Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education atthe Harvard Graduate School of Education, de-vised the theory of multiple intelligences, a cri-tique of the notion that there exists but a singlehuman intelligence that can be assessed by stan-dard psychometric instruments. His most recentbooks are “Changing Minds” (2004), “MakingGood” (with Wendy Fischman, Becca Soloman,and Deborah Greenspan, 2004), and “GoodWork” (with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Wil-liam Damon, 2001). Gardner has been a Fellowof the American Academy since 1995.

Lee S. Shulman, a Fellow of the American Acad-emy since 2002, is president of the CarnegieFoundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Charles E. Ducommun Professor of Educa-tion Emeritus at Stanford University. His latestbooks are “Teaching as Community Property:Essays on Higher Education” (2004) and “TheWisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learn-ing, and Learning to Teach” (2004).

© 2005 by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences

fessional. Some in higher education seecreeping professionalism as the enemyof liberal learning. Perhaps most dra-matically, potent market forces, untem-pered by forces of equivalent power,have made it increasingly dif½cult todelineate just how professionals todaydiffer from those nonprofessionals whoalso have power and resources in thesociety.

Triumphant on the one hand, undercritical scrutiny on the other, the profes-sions stand in need of fresh attentiontoday. In the essays that follow, our au-thors review the professions in contem-porary America–and the very idea ofhaving a vocation or calling. We raise the question of whether the professionswill survive in their recognizable form,evolve into quite different entities, ordissolve entirely; and whether the meth-ods that have been developed for educat-ing professionals are adequate to thecurrent intellectual, practical, and ethi-cal demands of these roles.

Generically, professions consist ofindividuals who are given a certainamount of prestige and autonomy in re-turn for performing for society a set ofservices in a disinterested way. At mid-century, American sociologists like Ber-nard Barber, Everett Hughes, RobertMerton, and Talcott Parsons limned the de½ning characteristics of the pro-fessions. Barber, for example, identi½edfour attributes: a high degree of gener-alized and systematic knowledge; a pri-mary orientation to community interestrather than personal interest; a high de-gree of self-control of behavior througha code of ethics; and a system of mone-tary and honorary rewards that symbol-ize achievements of the work itself. Inmore recent times, important studies ofspeci½c professions have been carriedout by Andrew Abbot, Howard Becker,

Elliot Freidson, Anthony Kronman, andPaul Starr–just to name a few who haveapproached the professions from a so-ciological perspective. These authoritieshave stressed the role of explicit trainingregimens, formal licensure, and proce-dures whereby untrained, incompetent,or unethical individuals can be excludedfrom practice.

In our view, six commonplaces arecharacteristic of all professions, properlyconstrued: a commitment to serve in theinterests of clients in particular and thewelfare of society in general; a body oftheory or special knowledge with itsown principles of growth and reorgani-zation; a specialized set of profession-al skills, practices, and performancesunique to the profession; the developedcapacity to render judgments with in-tegrity under conditions of both techni-cal and ethical uncertainty; an organizedapproach to learning from experienceboth individually and collectively and,thus, of growing new knowledge fromthe contexts of practice; and the devel-opment of a professional communityresponsible for the oversight and moni-toring of quality in both practice andprofessional education.

The primary feature of any profession –the commitment to serve responsibly,selflessly, and wisely–sets the terms ofthe compact between the profession andthe society. The centrality of this com-mitment de½nes the inherently ethicalrelationship between the professionaland the general society. It also sets up theessential tension between the two polesof professional responsibility: the dutyto serve the interests of one’s immediateclient and the obligation one has to thesociety at large. The lawyer’s dual re-sponsibilities of serving as both an of½-cer of the court and as a zealous advo-cate for her clients exemplify this ten-sion. Failure to deal responsibly with

14 Dædalus Summer 2005

HowardGardner & Lee S. Shulmanonprofessions & profes-sionals

this tension frequently creates the condi-tions that we have termed ‘compromisedpractice.’

Second, every profession lays claim toa theoretical knowledge base–a body ofresearch, conceptions, and traditionsthat is the normative touchstone for itsefforts. Whether that knowledge base isa body of biomedical research and theo-ry, a collection of sacred texts, or a bodyof laws, regulations, and legal decisions,professions rest much of their authorityon knowledge that, to some degree, de-velops both independently of the prac-tice of the profession and in conjunctionwith it. For this reason, most of the pro-fessions, properly understood, have aplace in the academy, the world of high-er education. Both during professionaleducation and through the course ofone’s career, the practicing professionalis expected to remain current with thegrowth and changes in that knowledgebase.

Third, the de½ning characteristic ofany profession is its mastery of a domainof practice. Professions are essentiallypractical performances. It is no accidentthat we regularly refer to professional‘practitioners’ and professional ‘prac-tice.’ The technical skills of analysis andargument, treatment and ritual, deliber-ation and diagnosis, action and interac-tion, are the hallmarks of any profession.We typically identify professions by thevery practices in which their membersengage. These practices have often de-veloped quite independently of the puta-tive knowledge base and ethical normsof the profession. There is thus a pre-dictable conflict in practice between thenorms of the academy and the norms ofthe professional practice community.How that conflict plays out in de½ningthe standards for competent practiceand malpractice, as well as the condi-tions for approved professional educa-

tion, is a drama that unfolds regularly inevery professional domain.

Fourth, the hallmark of all professions,even beyond the prototypical practicesof each, is the ubiquitous condition ofuncertainty, novelty, and unpredictabili-ty that characterizes professional work.While much of professional practice isroutine, the essential challenges of pro-fessional work center on the need tomake complex judgments and decisionsleading to skilled actions under condi-tions of uncertainty. This means thatprofessional practice is frequently pur-sued at or beyond the margins of previ-ously learned performances. That cir-cumstance creates two related chal-lenges for professional practice and edu-cation: professionals must be trained tooperate at the uncertain limits of theirprevious experience, and must also beprepared to learn from the consequencesof their actions to develop new under-standings and better routines. Theymust also develop ways of exchangingthose understandings with other profes-sionals so the entire professional com-munity bene½ts from their insight.

The need for professional judgmentand action under conditions of uncer-tainty gives rise to the ½fth common-place of professions: the continuingneed to learn from one’s experience–to grow smarter, wiser, and more skilledthrough the very experience of engagingin professional practice thoughtfully andreflectively. But no single practicing pro-fessional can accomplish that end andadequately aggregate and judge the les-sons of practice while working in isola-tion. The conditions of professionalpractice and professional learning de-mand the establishment and smoothfunctioning of professional communi-ties.

The sixth feature is therefore connect-ed to learning to practice as a member of


The professionsin Americatoday: crucial butfragile

a professional community, charged withresponsibility for establishing and re-newing standards for both practice andprofessional education, for critically re-viewing claims for new ideas and tech-niques and disseminating the worthyones widely within the community ofpractice, and for generally overseeing thequality of performances at all stages ofthe career.

At the present time, few would disputethe claim that physicians, lawyers, archi-tects, accountants, engineers, and clergyare professionals. Most would considernurses, social workers, and teachers asmembers of critically important, albeitless prestigious, professions. (The lowerprestige of the latter group of practition-ers is generally attributed to the status ofthose whom they serve, and to the factthat their ranks have long been populat-ed primarily by women–a situation thatmay be changing.) Other practitionerssuch as politicians, journalists, and foundation program of½cers have someclaim to professional status. We wouldnot consider artists, entertainers, ath-letes, or businesspersons to be profes-sionals in the usual sense; but it is worthnoting that any individual or group maychoose to behave as a professional. Andwe can suggest as well that some groupsof workers, like engineers, have im-proved their standings as professionals,while others, such as accountants in re-cent years, have undermined the statusof their profession.

Whatever the ½ne points of de½nition,the professions date from ancient times –the Hippocratic oath, for instance, hasbeen with us for millennia. Aspects oftraining, expertise, membership, and ex-clusion were characteristic of the medi-eval guilds. When universities were cre-ated centuries ago in Europe, they wereintended primarily as institutions for

the preparation of professionals: physi-cians, theologians and clergy, lawyers,and teachers of the disciplines. It wasalready clear in the late Middle Ages thatpreparing young people (and they wereunimaginably young!) to ‘profess’ was aserious challenge, and that a new institu-tion–the university–needed inventionto accomplish that end.

Across the centuries, controversieshave swirled around the ways the profes-sions organized themselves for practice.Varieties of guilds and professional soci-eties, as well as diverse educational insti-tutions, set standards of quality and li-censure. Their purpose has been to en-sure quality through controlling access,thus protecting the public from the dan-gers of incompetent practitioners, and to safeguard the professions against theslings and arrows of outraged clients,political leaders, and organized (as wellas disorganized) competitors.

At the start of the twentieth century,various authorities wrote foundationalworks on the professions. From the so-ciological perspective, Max Weber em-phasized a moral, as well as a technicaland pragmatic dimension, across thelearned professions. Surveying the med-ical profession in the United States, edu-cator Abraham Flexner emphasized thecritical connections between the medi-cal profession and the recent explosivegrowth of science; this trend called forthe embedding of professional educationwithin the universities. In the UnitedStates, the Progressive movement of theera both enhanced the prestige of theprofessions and conferred upon them anelite status. Professionals were expectedto put aside personal motivations and tobehave in a selfless and socially responsi-ble way.

At midcentury, as documented in theearlier Dædalus, the professions had at-tained the heights of status, and the best



in each profession were admired as rolemodels. However, admissions policiesand licensing predilections largelybarred the professions to women andthose who lacked a privileged back-ground. The trends of egalitarianism inthe 1960s opened up the professions to amuch wider pool of talent; at the sametime, however, the ideal of the disinter-ested professional became more elusive,and criticism of the ‘elite’ professionsmounted.

It is worth noting that now, at the verytime when professions are being chal-lenged in America and other Westernsocieties, attempts are being made toconsolidate them in other parts of theworld. In contemporary China, for ex-ample, strenuous efforts are underwayto establish the law as a realm independ-ent of the state, and to train lawyers tosee themselves as of½cers of an inde-pendent judiciary. Controversy swirls in Hong Kong and on the Chinese main-land about the degree to which journal-ists should defend the state, engage inself-censorship, report in a neutral man-ner, or serve as a counterweight to of½-cial propaganda. It would be ironic ifprofessions were to gain credibility inEast Asia even as they are becoming de-legitimized in societies where they oncethrived.

Roughly a decade ago, reflectingtrends in psychology and education, twogroups–the Preparation for the Profes-sions Program and the GoodWork Pro-ject–embarked on large-scale studies of professional life in America today.The goals of these empirical investiga-tions were to survey a number of Amer-ican professions and to draw broaderconclusions about the status and pros-pects of professional training and life.Both studies include a comparative di-mension and have turned out to be syn-

ergistically complementary to one an-other. Most of the thematic essays inthis issue of Dædalus grow out of thesetwo research groups’ decision to collab-orate on a set of papers that draw lessonsfrom the groups’ joint efforts.

Led by scholars at the Carnegie Foun-dation for the Advancement of Teach-ing, the Preparation for the ProfessionsProgram has sought to understand thenature of professional training today in a variety of ½elds, including medicine,law, engineering, teaching, nursing, andthe ministry. Scholars at Carnegie arealso studying the Ph.D. as a profession-al degree that prepares individuals forcareers in the academic professions ofmathematics, history, neuroscience,chemistry, English, and education.Thinking of the Ph.D. as a program ofprofessional preparation sheds entirelynew light on the concept of a ‘doctor ofphilosophy.’ The work of the Carnegieteam looks primarily at the period lead-ing up to professional practice, most ofwhich occurs in formal educational set-tings. The commonplaces laid out abovehave emerged during the ½rst phases ofthe Carnegie study.

Under the direction of scholars atClaremont Graduate University, Har-vard University, and Stanford Univer-sity, the GoodWork Project examinesmore mature practice–the experiencesof both new and veteran professionals as they attempt to cope with changingconditions and powerful market forces.The GoodWork Project has investigat-ed journalism, genetics, theater, law, philanthropy, and higher education, among other ½elds. As currently con-ceptualized, good work consists ofthree facets: excellence in practice ofthe profession; an enduring concernwith the social and ethical implicationsof one’s work; and a feeling on the partof the practitioner that he or she is en-


The professionsin Americatoday: crucial butfragile

gaged in work that matters and that feelsgood.

Much of the impetus of the Good-Work Project came from our realizationthat unchecked market forces constitutea strong challenge to the professions.When no line remains inviolate save thebottom line, the distinction betweenprofessionals and ‘mere workers’ disap-pears. It is our observation that the cur-rent emphasis on market models andprinciples, in the absence of signi½cantcounterforces of a religious, ideological,or communal sort, constitutes an enor-mous challenge to all professions. Thisobservation is con½rmed by our studiesof young workers. While all acknowl-edge and applaud the features of goodwork, a signi½cant number of youngprofessionals feel unable to pursue goodwork at this time. And so they consolethemselves with the belief that once theyhave attained monetary success they willbe able to pursue it–a prototypical tri-umph of ends over means.

Taken together, the essays in this col-lection attest to the continuing impor-tance of the professions in America andelsewhere; to their perennial fragility,particularly in the face of powerful andrelatively uncontested forces; and to theneed both for excellent and ethical train-ing during formation and for strong educational and institutional supportthroughout one’s professional life. Ittook centuries for professions to achievetheir central role in a complex society; itwould take far less time to underminetheir legitimacy. As a society, we need todecide whether we value our professionsenough to provide suf½cient continuingpopular and institutional support.



howard gardner & lee s. shulman the

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