“Professionalism” as Code for Submissiveness and Deference
Faculty are highly-educated people who have spent a lot of time studying within their scholarly fields, and acting as experienced representative of those disciplines. They are often called “professionals” and when they aspire and live up to disciplinary expectations, it’s called “professionalism”.
Given the high occupational status of faculty and the esteemed prestige associated with universities, it’s easy to assume that such faculty ought to be “well-heeled”, respectful, and polite. While it’s never a good policy to universally be an asshole, just because someone has lots of advanced degree and a high prestige job doesn’t mean that they shouldn't be able to fight and demand respect when they are poorly treated by administrators. Protesting or striking are often accused of being “unprofessional”, since faculty end up speaking (or chanting) emotionally, waving their fists, and refusing to offer those admins the deference they [incorrectly] believe they deserve.
This logic has succeeded in preventing all sorts of white-collar workers from organizing unions—labor struggles are assumed to be something that those overly-emotional, working-class blue-collar workers might resort to, but not professionals and not academics! In addition to the classist stereotypes of this anti-working class viewpoint, it also denies a whole class of white-collar workers the legitimacy of also petitioning for their rights, too.
It is better to occasionally chant slogans like “chop from the top” or to accept injustice? Should knowledge workers be able to boldly confront their admins or should they submissively constrain themselves to the expertise contained in just their own narrow subfields of study? It’s clear that admins would prefer to use faculty’s privileged positions against them, demanding that they “act appropriate to their station”. This is just a snooty way of demanding they accept their mistreatment silently. Such politeness and domesticity obscures that mistreatment. Respecting rigid standards of professional restraint is bullshit in an era of austerity and neoliberalism, where workers are simply expected to relinquish all their collective power in the face of the wild, uncontrollable market. Faculty ought to refuse submission to admin exploitation and their condescending demands to “act professional”.