Intellectuals And Political Persons: A Study On The Role Of University Teachers

University teachers, one of the most important parts in the university system, have always been the focus in the academia both at home and abroad. While as part of the whole society, university teachers, a group of professionals play a diverse of roles in social life. With a perspective of sociology, this thesis which based on the theory of sociology analyzes various roles university teachers played. They are the elite of a society who are the professionals in their academic fields. Besides that, university teachers branch out into the field of social life as well as political field. They are the intellectuals maintaining social conscience and justice. This means that the role university teachers played is not only as intellectuals but also as political persons. This thesis, firstly, is to provide a glimpse into the characteristics of the roles of university teachers. They are the ones who stand right in the higher education field endowed with knowledge and power. Therefore, they stand between academic and political. The institutionalized school education has given university teachers statutory identity of being intellectuals and political persons. However, the characteristics of the dual role at the same time become a contradiction the teachers encountered with. Because of the two different values they have, the dual role university teachers played forms an inherent conflict in the process of their life. This is not an isolated phenomenon but a whole in the group. Secondly, the thesis is to reveal the characteristics of university teachers'role which is subject to the nation and the society by showing their real life as person of both knowledge and political. With the change of time, the role of political that university teachers played are increasingly marginalized. They are moving away from political life. As the public intellectuals, the responsibility of caring the mass and criticizing the society on their shoulder is diluted. At last, this thesis explores transformation university teachers have gone through. In the past, they are the elite as intellectuals and political. Now, their role is popularized. Therefore, the role of university teachers based on the definition of intellectuals should contribute to the innovation of knowledge, cultivation of students and caring of the society. They need to awaken their conscience inside and their critical spirit as intellectuals. Therefore, university teachers as knowledge producers can not just define themselves as the embodiment of science. They are responsible to interpret the problems emerged in social life and shoulder the responsibility of social criticism as public intellectuals. Their dual academic cares to the society do not lose the original charm. Therefore, university teachers must re-establish its role of public intellectuals and social criticism in accordance with the changes of the times. This requires that university teachers should not stick in the ivory tower. They have to move away from a narrow academic field on campus into the society where they should pay more attention to politics, grasp the pulse of the society and understand social trends in order to regain their role of caring the society.This thesis which is mainly built on university teachers'role in the field of knowledge and power is to discuss their academic mission and the characteristics of the roles they played. Based on the field of research sample, the thesis—relying on the Role Theory, the Theory of Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and the Theory on Intellectuals—reveals the characteristics of university teachers in China as person of both knowledge and political and the conflict derived from it. This is the way we should use to explore the academic mission and characteristics of university teachers. The thesis is the localized research, although it consults the study of western modern sociology, cultural studies, anthropology as well as other theories and concepts to analyze the problem, but the objects are university teachers in China. The main methodologies are literature, interviews and analysis appropriate cases.The paper use of field research paradigm to analysis university teacher's role. The conception of the field completely reflects the basic features of modern society. In this highly differentiated society, the social world is made up of a large number of small social groups which have their own autonomy. These small groups in the society have their own logic and necessity of the objective relationship space. The application of Fields-Based Analysis introduces not only the factors of conflict, struggle, power, capital, scientific sociology, sociology of scientific knowledge into perspective under the sociology of knowledge, it also further enrich the horizon of university teachers sociological research. In addition, this thesis brings forth a strong sense of discipline. It opened a new research perspective to teacher's role in universities through sociological theory to study the relationship between university teachers'role and knowledge."intellectuals"is an important concept in sociology of knowledge. Based on the significance of sociology of knowledge,"intellectuals"is defined as person who is dependent on and take the participation of knowledge. So under this definition, a teacher is a intellectuals or intellectuals. In this sense, with intellectuals'theory, we can explore the characteristics of university teachers'role from the definition and standard of "intellectuals" as well as their roles in society to study characteristics of the roles of university teachers. In a certain sense, one can say that the sociology of knowledge endows new growth point to the research of university teacher's role which is of great value.