In the last year, three respected leaders in academic advising, Wes Habley, Terry Kuhn, and Gary Padak, published articles suggesting that academic advising has not met the standards of scholarship to be considered a field of inquiry, an academic discipline, or a profession. In this article, we examine academic advising history from the perspective of the discipline of sociology, through which scholars systematically study the processes whereby activities are transformed from occupations into professions. Indeed, we agree that academic advising has not met the typical sociological standards that accompany societal recognition for a profession, and we suggest that strengthened advisor education and credentialing are the steps necessary to secure public recognition of academic advising as a profession.

Recent developments in the knowledge-driven, postindustrial economy have radically affected college students' prospects for entering and completing successful careers. In this volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment, fewer organizations find profitability in hiring, training, and retaining workers. Over the last 20 years, traditional careers, with lifelong security and opportunities for financial success, have been systematically replaced by a contract with workers who maintain their own employability. In addition, college degrees no longer assure graduates of having marketable knowledge and skills, and so traditional career advising yields limited results in a VUCA environment. This is the first in a series of articles outlining a human capital approach to career advising that addresses the challenges of a VUCA environment.

Human capital, defined as any characteristic of a worker that contributes to that worker kprod~~ctivity, is presented in this article as a unrfLing theme for academic advising in higher education. Five categories of human capital-formal education, adult education, on-the-job-training, health, and geographic mobiliv-and academic advising issues related to developing students' human capital in each categoly are presented. Students ' vocational interests are identified with developing their human capital, and the principle of maximizing human capital is introduced as a basis for students' choices of academic curricula and particular courses and programs.

Recounts the controversy triggered by Senator W. Proxmire's public criticism of the "love research" proposed by E. Berscheid and E. Walster to the National Science Foundation. The controversy is treated as a case study in anti-intellectual behavior and is discussed in relation to other contemporary instances of opposition to scholarly work. It is argued that Proxmire's rhetoric, which preoccupied the public responses of the academic community, served to obscure two more significant sources of opposition: disagreement between intellectuals and the public over the value of knowledge (often called anti-intellectualism) and public misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge––particularly the epistemology of the social sciences. An assessment of the threat currently presented by these sources of opposition is given, and a call for more active involvement of psychologists in improving public understanding of social science is presented. (41 ref)

In his Tree of Knowledge (ToK) System, Henriques (2003) posits that the human ego or “self” has evolved because human beings are the only animals that have had to justify their behavior to others. This essay provides evidence for this Justification Hypothesis (JH) from everyday life sociology, starting with the work of George Herbert Mead and Charles Horton Cooley, and focuses on research related to the concept of the “looking‐glass self.” Special emphasis is given to the pragmatics of speech acts, the presentation of self in interaction rituals, the accounts given by actors in justification of their actions, and the role of social norms and conformity in the large‐scale justification systems commonly called “culture.” © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol.