Academics' legitimacy and self-worth: Exploring connections between English, professional identity, and neoliberal trends in Italian academia

As contemporary higher education (HE) strives to become more international, pre-existing notions of what universities set out to achieve and which stakeholders are involved in the process can be challenged. For example, academics are increasingly being expected to fulfil various professional functions through the use of English, despite little attention having been devoted to what this may mean for their professional identity and sense of legitimacy. In this chapter, I explore how English affects multilingual academics’ perceptions of their legitimacy and self-worth; furthermore, through the application of the conceptual constructs of craftsmanship, usefulness, and narrative (Sennett, 2006), I seek to unravel how such influence is connected to broader changes in the professional environment of HE. To that end, I analysed a dataset of 13 interviews with multilingual academics from Italian public universities, discussing the role of English in various aspects of their profession. Results indicate that English influences not only academics’ knowledge production and circulation but also the sense of their professional self on multiple levels. Furthermore, they point to a connection between English's unique positioning in global academia and the neoliberal pressures increasingly faced by academics.