I happened to come across this post from 2015 where I discussed a remark from a political journalist who advocated “some measure of accountability . . . which allows both that very bad teachers be fired and that very good ones can obtain greater pay and recognition. That’s the definition of a professional career track . . .”
What interested me there was not the question of how easy it should be to promote or fire teachers, but rather the idea that the risk of being fired is part of “the definition of a professional career track.”
OK, I’m not trying to take him literally. If you look up “professional” in the dictionary it says, “engaged in a profession that requires academic learning as preparation,” and if you look up “profession,” you get “a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive academic preparation.” Obviously he didn’t literally mean that being fired is part of the definition, more that it’s a core or essential part of what being a professional is.
It was funny for me to see this because being a tenured professor is part of a professional career track, and we can’t be fired. Also, at a lot of universities there’s not much range for promotion either. On the other hand, I’d call journalism a profession too, and, unfortunately, journalists get fired all the time. Not just “very bad” journalists either. Journalists lose their jobs because of well-known economic factors leading to a decades-long decline in employment in that field.
I guess a more accurate way to put it is not that the risk of being fired is an essential part of a professional career track, but rather that this journalist thinks that this risk should be an essential part of any professional career track.
And I see where he’s coming from. I don’t want to be at risk of being fired–but there are lots of professors I know for whom, if they were fired, I’d be cool with that.
The thing I’m worried about is that whoever has the ability to do this firing will use this ability to extort things out of me or to retaliate at me. But I guess that’s where the “measure of accountability” comes in.
At this point I expect many of you will be groaning and saying that the vast majority of employees in this country can be fired for no reason at any time (“at-will employment,” as they call it) and I’m privileged to have a job where it’s really hard to fire me. To which I reply: I agree that I’m privileged, and not just in my job. I’m privileged in so many ways. Maybe more people should be privileged in this way!
But actually that’s not what I wanted to talk about here–we already covered most of this in our 2015 post and subsequent comment thread.
Here’s my question for you
Rather, I wanted to ask, from scratch, the question posed by the title of this post: What is “the definition of a professional career”?
The traditional definition, requiring academic learning, covers a lot. Doctors, lawyers, college professors all require long and intensive academic preparation. Physical therapists, too, and physical therapists do seem much more professional than they did thirty years ago. It also seems to me that professionalism involves some sort of standardization: a job category being more “professional” is often associated with a low variance, not necessarily in abilities but in how they comport themselves. When you go to a doctor or a dentist, they always act like doctors or dentists. Lawyers too, to some extent. Maybe K-12 teachers, not so much. K-12 teachers require academic learning but not so much as those other professions.
What about getting fired? Things have changed. Back in the day, doctors were mostly self-employed. Now I imagine they’re mostly employees. So I guess they can get fired. When you’re self-employed you can’t get fired but you can go out of business.
There’s also the distinction between the professions and the trades. For some reason, people always seem to want to bring up plumbers. To be a plumber you need training, but it’s not academic training. I guess you’d be a better plumber if you took a few physics classes, in the same way that it’s probably a good idea that pre-med students have to learn a bunch of biology. Architect is a profession because architectural training is academic, or because it’s traditionally an upper-middle-class job rather than a lower-middle-class job? And then there are lots of jobs that require little or no special training at all, but they require some skills or competence, like carrying boxes or caring for kids or elders. These sorts of jobs could become professionalized too, which is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you think about it.
And then there’s journalism, and writing more generally. Traditionally no barriers to entry and a path forward for lots of people to make their mark, from Jim Thompson and Carl Bernstein on down: some of these people went to college and some didn’t–going to college is a great thing, you can learn a lot, even if it’s not giving you job qualifications–and even in later decades when more and more journalists were college graduates, it’s not like it was required.
I remember a bunch of years ago there were some political scientists writing about the professionalization of state legislators. In that context, “professional” meant that being a legislator was a full-time job, or close to it, with a good salary and some staff. In this case, professionalism had nothing to do with academic qualifications; it was being used in the same way as we talk about a “professional” athlete. A professional athlete makes a living from it; a semi-pro gets paid but needs some other job; an amateur does it just for fun.
So in a conversation about the so-called gig economy (speaking of journalists), being a professional means that you have a steady job that pays reasonably well. If you work at a nice restaurant, you can be a professional waitress. In that sense, I guess that many of my favorite novelists are not professional writers; they need to hold down other jobs such as teaching at universities. In which case they are professionals, but not at the task that uses their best talents.
P.S. Academic tenure only came up briefly in this post, but several people brought it up in the discussion. For those of you interested in my thoughts on the matter, I’ll point you to these two posts from 2011:
– The “cushy life” of a University of Illinois sociology professor
“some measure of accountability . . . which allows both that very bad teachers be fired and that very good ones can obtain greater pay and recognition. That’s the definition of a professional career track”
Political talking heads are not a professional career track then. They can make nonsense claims and wrong predictions all the time and as long as they are sufficiently pro-government they are allowed to stay.
“being a tenured professor is part of a professional career track, and we can’t be fired”
I know this comports with the actual practice, but I think this is a major problem. Tenure does mean you can be fired and the horribly inadequate “post tenure review” was supposed to be part of ensuring that tenure does not protect professionals from inadequate performance. I do think that part of being a professional should entail the ability to be fired – not without reason of course. But if professional standards only need to be obtained once in a lifetime, then I think it undermines the definition of being a professional. We require doctors and lawyers (and perhaps some other professions) to jump through various hoops (e.g. continuing education) to maintain their licensure, but not university professors. Why should we be exempt? Is there something about academia that says once you meet the requirements you have met them for life? And, if that is the case, why isn’t it also true for doctors, etc.?
I think the practical reality is that all of these processes designed to ensure that professionals still meet the requirements of their profession work poorly. Incumbents are hard to displace (I think it is somewhat related to the idea that papers, once published, are difficult to retract or even publicly critique). Our standards for continuing performance are pretty bad. They seem to be worse for professors than doctors or lawyers – and I would attribute that to the fact that we view professors’ services as not as critical as those for other professions.
There are reasons to protect academics from being fired for their ideas. But it is a reflection of how much politics is part of university life (and I don’t mean R vs D politics, but I’m using the word more generally) that we don’t trust any process to judge whether professional standards are being maintained. Tenure – the idea – is something I think worth protecting: tenure – the practice – not so much.
I think part of the problem now is that academia has gotten to be a worse and worse job in many ways, and if you take away job security for the lucky few who get tenure, (except maybe if you increase pay commensurate to what a similarly credentialed professional in another field would make, which we’re not going to do), the people left in the pipeline may not be people you want.
That said, tenure as practiced doesn’t work; you seemingly can’t even get rid of people for egregious misconduct without years of lawsuits. There was an older guy in my grad department who was super inappropriate with undergrads to a legal liability extent, and even him they basically just put in a hole and made him teach the worst classes he was qualified for and didn’t let him take grad students or meet one on one with undergrads.
(Stubborn guy. It was years before he retired even though he was already pretty old, and even then I think they bought him out to finally get him to go.)
Dale:
I agree that things are complicated. There are lots of professors who can’t or won’t do the job, and lots of “deadwood” types who stopped doing research right around when they got tenure. Even worse, perhaps, are those who have nothing interesting to say but keep publishing, promoting the careers of their students, and playing the game. Unfortunately this last group seem very unlikely to get fired, except in extreme cases such as that dean of engineering at the University of Nevada. Even Dan Ariely seems to still have a tenured position.
Lots of corporate executives are also under essentially zero risk of getting fired for misconduct. I guess the difference is that a corporation, even if successful, can fire people for financial reasons whenever it wants. I knew someone who worked for a major pharmaceutical company which had a habit of eliminating people’s jobs shortly before they were eligible for retirement.
In any case, yeah, don’t take my above post as a defense of academic tenure or, for that matter, as a criticism of it.
The starting point of my post was that I think it’s ridiculous to consider the possibility of getting fired for poor performance as “the definition of a professional career.” Lots of people in non-professional careers get fired for poor performance all the time, and lots of professionals have essentially no chance of getting fired for poor performance. The rest of my post was to explore what it means to consider a career to be “professional.”
In the case of executives, you are right that they don’t get fired. They get asked to leave – with large severance packages. Even worse than tenure for ensuring ongoing quality.
To my knowledge, tenured professors can be fired for cause, but the bar is high. The bar is high in many other professions too, however. This kind of discourse totally overlooks that in any profession (or vocation if you prefer), people are rarely fired *for poor performance*. Employees are most often fired for business reasons, and the choice of who gets fired is almost never actually related to job performance. And when it is related to job performance, it usually happens early. Employee fired after years on the job for performance reasons happens rarely.
“tenured professors can be fired for cause, but the bar is high”
i hasten to add that this is already changing and a bunch of states have either eliminated tenure or are in the process of doing so, and the result of this will be more academics fired for political reasons and certainly not more academics fired for genuine misconduct.
Almost impossibly high unless you are willing to spend money fighting in court, which many schools unfortunately see as not worth it. (This is a problem in any context with meaningful labor protections, not just academia, fwiw)
I also don’t think I agree that who gets laid off when layoffs happen has nothing to do with performance. My experience is that layoffs are used to get rid of deadwood that you didn’t want to actually fire for whatever reason (but also involve getting rid of a lot of people whose performance is fine to good)
Generally speaking, I am in favour of making it difficult to fire university professors. I see this as a safeguard for democracy. For centuries, universities have been hotbeds of institutional change. It was mostly the students who did the heavy lifting, but the professors flanked them often enough. The idea is to protect higher education and public discourse within universities from government influence.
I am not saying the system is perfect and does not need changing — far from it! I am advocating careful carve-outs to improve the weeding-out process. Eliminating all safeguards would make it much easier for the government to exert its influence, which is problematic when the government begins to curtail democracy and civil rights.
In practice, research misconduct convictions could be given more teeth. It seems to me that, when researchers produce shoddy science with reckless disregard for the truth, the worst that happens to them is a confidential (!) report saying, ‘You have been naughty!’ However, the problem is not so much the potential punishments that can accompany a conviction. The problem usually is that professors investigate their colleagues. The incentives point towards letting them off the hook. Institutional separation of the investigative body from the universities would likely alleviate the pressure to downplay misconduct and avoid convictions.
(Note, however, that we will always run into the corruption-fighting paradox: if we do too little, the ‘bad guys’ will not be caught; if we do too much, we will sow paranoia and distrust in the system, thereby undermining the ‘good guys’.)
I suspect that the key word in “professional career track” is “track,” and that the journalist is commenting on the lack of the “track” part for jobs in which one can’t progress or be fired. It’s not that it isn’t “professional,” it’s that it isn’t a “track.” It’s a rock amid a stream, that one stands still on.
“I guess a more accurate way to put it is not that the risk of being fired is an essential part of a professional career track, but rather that this journalist thinks that this risk should be an essential part of any professional career track.”
The challenge here is the Principal Agent problem, namely that the people who do this firing in public institutions may act in their own best interests and not that of the institution. Sure, you can hold them accountable but, at a very deep level, this is just “who watches the watchers” sore of dilemma. It seems unlikely that the board structure of a university can do this well. It’s also not like a public corporation, where profit is the only metric and so very bad management is (at least potentially) visible if it hurts profits.
It is not an easy problem
+1
I had never heard of the Principal Agent problem, that is an interesting concept although it doesn’t quite match my own personal experience with administrators.
Years ago, I read a business-lit book that used the term “company men” (it was all men back then) to describe middle managers who focused exclusively on their own next promotion. The implication was that they had zero interest in the mission of the enterprise, only in short term gains that would reflect well on them, such as cost-cutting in ways that harm the mission but make them look more efficient.
I think with the growth of the administrative state in academia (Paul Campos has written extensively on this), this sort of behavior has bled over and now affects college professors. The last thing a dean who is a company man/woman wants is tenured employees. That limits their power to keep everything running smoothly by dropping the hammer on any malcontents.
All the managers I worked for were company men or women. Any dedication to the mission was left behind before the first promotion into management. The upper managers were very careful about that, otherwise they could end up not just with a loose cannon, but an empowered loose cannon. The problem with a loose cannon is not that it reflects poorly on you as the middle manager, but that it also reflects poorly on YOUR manager, and that is likely to piss her off and cause her to pass over you for the next promotion, an outcome to be avoided at any cost.
When issues like Palestine/Israel arise on campus, the administrators couldn’t possibly care less about who is supporting genocide or committing antisemitism. All they care about is whether someone who is in their organization – under their power – does something that they perceive as drawing unwanted attention to the enterprise. Only then will they leap into action…to squash the person who drew the attention.
From this perspective, the ability to fire someone has very little to do with professionalism and a lot to do with the ongoing invasion of the company men.
Just to clarify, it’s usually called the “principal-agent problem,” not the “principal agent problem.” The problem is that the principal and the agent are two different people. The hyphen is there because otherwise it could be misinterpreted as being about a “principal agent.”
Fair enough. :-)
Sociologists’ go-to reference on this topic is still Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions (1988). For Abbott, professions are groups that have used abstract knowledge claims to win jurisdiction over their domain of work, controlling who enters and what they do. In the US, you could consistently perform miracles of medicine, but if your state medical board hasn’t licensed you, your practice is illegal. The same goes for legal work and the state bar. Architecture is a good example of a profession still fighting jurisdictional battles with structural engineers, design-build contractors, and interior designers. Randall Collins’s The Credential Society (1979) has a nice historical case of how the same work can professionalize differently across countries: French engineers achieved strong professional status through state credentialing institutions like the École Polytechnique, while American engineers’ political disorganization failed to achieve similar state-backed closure.
Lay definitions of “profession” sprawl all over, as the post illustrates, but I’ve found the jurisdiction frame helpful for these sorts of questions.
Nick:
Thanks for the references. I guess the interesting question is, how is it that “professional career” is a sort of natural kind that leads people like that journalist to try to come up with definitions for it.
Departing from citations to vibes, I would guess an economic and a moral feature give “professional career” its thingness for opiners:
1. Professionals have had solid career security in recent decades, even compared to high-paying non-professionalized fields like software engineering or biotechnology. People are curious where that security comes from.
2. Successful professions secure moral authority by articulating and identifying with professional virtues and developing codes of ethics. People notice that conspicuous moral authority and try to divine its source.
Ahhhh, good thoughts, thanks.
“how is it that “professional career” is a sort of natural kind that leads people like that journalist to try to come up with definitions for it.”
Definitely not natural. In German, a plumber can definitely be called a professional. Or in other words, there is no real analogue in German of the concept of ‘professional’ (restricted to those with an academic training) you are describing. Seems like an anglo thing…
Self-employed doctors can’t be fired, but they can have their medical license revoked. Which I guess is like being “fired”.
On the flip side, a doctor might go out of business or get laid off from a hospital due to economic reasons (unrelated to competence) but would still retain their license.
Maybe that should be the definition of professional: requiring a license to practice, whose validity is orthogonal to economic considerations.
“the definition of professional: requiring a license to practice”
Good point, but that includes plumbers.
Mind you, this was the last century but growing up as the child of two medical doctors, I thought a “profession” meant things like medicine, law, or engineering. Then I got to academia and started hearing people talk about the “philosophy profession,” which always sounded a little off to me. You can’t get sued for philosophical malpractice. If you could, the courts would already be buried under modal-realism-related bankruptcy cases. Of course, there are a couple of reasons you can’t get sued for philosophical malpractice. The first is obvious. The second is that there’s no real standardization of practice, and there never will be. If someone ever proposes a standard, that proposal will shortly be followed by the rise of a nonstandard philosophy that relaxes some aspect of the proposed standardization.
Jeff:
I think that journalism is considered a profession, but it’s also been said that the institution of journalism was better back when reporters mostly didn’t have college degrees.
There’s no licensing for journalists (although there are broadcast licenses). Many countries however have journalism oversight boards run by the profession itself, to which the public can direct complaints of malpractice. Of course, due to press freedom, these boards cannot sanction either journalists or outlets in any meaningful way, they can only reprimand them. As pointed out below, journalism is itself a profession woefully immune to accountability.
I think your comment is only a starter and doesn’t resolve anything. Why are we able to standardize the practice of law or medicine and not academic disciplines or university teaching? It isn’t so obvious to me. What you can be sued for is a somewhat different question – I believe years ago there was the case of an Italian cruise ship that got stuck and the weather forecasters were being held liable for bad forecasts. My point is that you can hold people legally responsible for lots of things, and the decision of when to standardize practice is a complex social decision. I don’t see a simple evidence-based way to determine what “professions” have standardized practices and which do not. Obviously, I see that some disciplines are more readily standardized than others, but it is a continuum not categorical.
We have decided to apply standards to some occupations and not others. We can try to justify these on the basis of costs and benefits, and on the degree to which objectively agreed standards are possible (but note that there will always be some variability, as there is in medicine). We also decide whether and how to create entities to monitor professional practice (whether it is self-policing or legally binding). It may be easy to agree that the case of standardizing medical practice is stronger than the case for standardizing philosophical teaching, but I don’t think that gets us very far. I don’t buy the idea that there should be no professional standards applied to university teaching. There are surely difficulties defining what those standards are, but in the absence of any standards – and with the protection of tenure – we get all sorts of poor practice.
Just one thought among many. I’m busy.
Thinking about academic professions and accountability has always seemed to me to miss the Isiah Berlin-ish aspect of academic work. Yes, having something like tenure does mean you can get stuck with people who aren’t doing much research or much else. That’s the price for having people who do research. The only way to do research effectively is to do the work without looking over your shoulder all the time. Tenure protects that. Further, you never know what the people who appear to be just futzing around are really up to. My favorite example is Piero Sraffa. Who produced two things in all his time at Cambridge: editing the collected works of David Ricardo (after 20 years) and The Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, all 120 or so pages of it. And who was a member of the “cafeteria group” along with – wait for it – Maynard Keynes, Frank Ramsey, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And was the source of an entire school of economics (Neo-Ricardian economics) subsequently. And was credited by Wittgenstein for many of the ideas in Philosophical Investigations. Tenure sure as hell makes sense for someone like that, academic production be damned. (Caveat: This whole debate is made more poignant by the vast hordes of “adjuncts” now being shamelessly exploited by universities.)
The unstated counterfactual is that this research would not take place if not for tenure. I question that. Good researchers may not need the protection of tenure (this is to some extent an empirical question that could be investigated). And plenty of bad research is done by people that get tenure. The statement that “[T]he only way to do research effectively is to do the work without looking over your shoulder all the time” is far from obvious as a defense of tenure. It is a choice whether or not to look over your shoulder. I spent the first 10 years of my academic career in 10 one year appointments – I chose to not look over my shoulder and possibly suffered bad job tenure as a result. But it was a choice. I’ve seen academics afraid to pursue lines of research without the protection of tenure – but that is also a choice, and one for which they bear responsibility.
Dale:
To continue on your point, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of research that didn’t get done, because of tenure. I’m thinking about the many people who could be doing important research, if only they had stable faculty positions–but they don’t have this opportunity because those positions are occupied by “deadwood” who haven’t done useful teaching, research, or service for decades.
On why it’s possible to standardize the practice of law or medicine and not academic disciplines or university teaching. In medicine (I’m coming from a UK perspective) and also dentistry and veterinary science the expectation is that practitioners adopt best practice, are expected to upgrade their knowledge and skills appropriately, conform to ethical standards and so on, and this can be overseen by a professional body (The General Medical Council for doctors in the UK). This can easily be standardized even if it isn’t always done as well as it might be. There is no expectation that doctors participate in research and the development of methods and treatments even if they can do this and often do. So the expectation is broadly that each doctor will address each patient interaction according to a definable set of criteria (in principle even if not in practice) and this can be standardized. Teaching curricula in these professional courses (we actually call them “professional” courses) are standardized according to the regulatory body (GMC; General Dental Council etc.)
As far as university teaching goes (UK perspective again), the expectation (in most Unis) is that university lecturers have a significant research effort that allows them to keep abreast of their field and to teach their subject at a high level. In first/second year courses their subjects are taught within a defined curriculum; in 3d/4th year courses the lecturer will have more latitude about what they teach although this will fit within a broad curriculum that is defined/updated by some sort of department or faculty teaching committee. The academic will have latitude in what research project they devise for undergrads and postgrads etc.
It’s not obvious how this might be standardized. That’s not to say that there isn’t oversight at many levels. The specific department or faculty oversees teaching (and research) “quality” and productivity, and a number of bodies (student feedback, Teaching Quality Assurance Agency, Office for Students) provide some oversight. But a fundamental point of University teaching and especially research is that it is expected continually to move beyond current practice even if the ethical and quality aspects can be overseen according to defined standards.
Perhaps medicine is a little more like plumbing which in the UK has a professional body (Chartered Institute of Plumbing and Heating Engineering) with a Code of Professional Standards, tho unlike doctors plumbers are not required to join!
Curious to know if things are quite different in the US
Notoriously, ‘scientific’ research on education and sports science is best used to stop drafts, and Americans with graduate degrees in education tend to be worse teachers than people with just an undergraduate degree. So best practices are not as well known as in investing (never buy individual stocks) or medicine (always wash your hands with soap and water before touching a new patient) or accounting (generally accepted accounting principles). Its quite reasonable for teachers to resist being forced to follow practices derived from cargo-cult science, even if they can’t articulate all the problems with the latest fad.
“Notoriously, ‘scientific’ research on education and sports science is best used to stop drafts”
What do you mean by this? Can you rephrase it?
I mean that a bright and cynical 20-year-old can disembowel most education and sports science ‘research,’ but you can at least use the paper it is printed on to fill cracks between boards or insulate your shed. What often happens is that someone comes out with a grand theory of education, it works great for him, OK for his students, and worse than the status quo for everyone else, which sounds like most of us trying different things until we find something that seems to work for us and our students.
Fun fact: In German, a plumber can definitely be called a professional. Or in other words, there is no real analogue in German of the concept of ‘professional’ (restricted to those with an academic training) you are describing. Seems like an anglo thing…
Journalists clamoring for making it easier for teachers to be fired annoy me, because journalism is itself a profession that is wiefully unable to uphold professional standards. Journalists can be fired, as you point out, but mostly this happens just to save money to the owners, and sometimes (increasingly in the US) journalists are fired for blatantly political reasons and under pressure from the fascist regime. What almost never happens is journalists being fired for malpractice, for doing a bad job, for breaking the fundamental rules of journalistic integrity. Accountability for journalists, editors, or journalistic outlets is nonexistent, to the grave detriment of a democratic society. Just ask Olivia Nuzzi.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freier_Beruf_(Deutschland)
I sent another link as anonymous so it may appear eventually but this one may be more useful as it’s in English:
https://www.firma.de/en/company-formation/what-is-a-freiberufler-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-liberal-professions-in-germany/
What is a Freiberufler? Liberal professions in Germany
Becoming a Freiberufler offers an attractive path to self-employment in Germany, especially for highly qualified professionals. However, this status is reserved for specific professions that meet strict legal and educational criteria.
Interesting point! But Freiberufler is really a technical definition for tax purposes. It’s not really used in the same way in which “professional” is used in English. The term Freiberufler requires an academic or semiacademic background but also requires that the person is self-employed, so a physician is only a Freiberufler in private practice, not if employed at a hospital.
Right, in many European countries there is also the independent (‘liberal profession’) aspect that doesn’t really exist in the UK/US legal systems. ‘Regulated professions’ seem more comparable across the world. The point is that at least for self-employed people there is a very clear distinction between ‘professions’ and ‘trades’ also in Germany (an even stronger distinction than in the anglo world, given the tax consequences).
There is a distinction but different from the topic of this thread… this started after all from the question whether it should be easier to fire “professionals”. The Freiberufler *by definition* can’t be fired!
Inhowfar the ‘Freiberufler’ classification is relevant in German ordinary social discourse (as opposed to the tax issue) I don’t really know. At least in my experience it doesn’t come up as frequently and not in the way in which the ‘professional’ comes up in anglo discourse. This may have something to do with the famous “Professional-managerial class” concept that is still a subject of hot debates among leftists. I have great respect for the late Barbara Ehrenreich but imho the PMC approach was misguided, because it’s neither well-defined nor does it correspond to an actual economic class.
> this started after all from the question whether it should be easier to fire “professionals”. The Freiberufler *by definition* can’t be fired!
The idea that the risk of being fired is part of “the definition of a professional career track” would make sense only if we focus on the “career track” context and think of the progression within an organization. I’d rather take that “definition” quoted to be about the “accountability” mentioned before and not about “the risk of being fired” specific to employees (the accountability exists for liberal professionals even if they cannot be “fired”).
I think of “professional” as deriving its meaning, more than anything, from (a) doing a thing for money, and (b) occupational closure (and credentialing). Teachers need degrees (e.g., to become certified), electricians need proof that they’ve apprenticed for 8 million hours (e.g., to pull licenses from a city), etc. to enter into a profession. For a lot of professions, the capacity to be disbarred seems essential: As you point out, lots of professionals are self-employed, but if your medical or tax license is stripped, you can no longer work in that profession.
So, I want to say that the journalist’s condition of pay is correct; their condition of education is better thought of as a sufficient (but not necessary) form of credential; and that the ability to be fired is just wrong (because, as you point out, lots of professionals are self-employed).
But all these claims I’m making around professionalism get sketchy when you get into the arts and sports. In my idiolect, at least, this is where the definitions of “professional” and “career” become intermingled.
I think of a “career” as more aligned with the stability you describe toward the end of your post. But for a lot of athletes, musicians, etc., I think the career is the credential needed to satisfy the definition for professionalism.
But now we hit a Sorites-type “When does the career amount to a profession?” problem, plus I’ve backed myself into the weird position of saying that a career server somehow isn’t a professional server, and I have to admit I’ve only answered your question with (at least) two questions. Sorry!