“The point is professionalization. Academics-in-training worry about whether they are yet, can ever be, or even want to be professional intellectuals of the kind they are changing themselves into. Second or third or fourth year graduate students have not taken binding vows. They may have second thoughts. Nor have they been finally chosen. They might flunk out. Their committee might turn their theses down. Who knows what might happen?”

— Howard S. Becker

Source: Writing for Social Scientists (1986), p. 52.

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Howard S. Becker 35

American sociologist 1928

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