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Based on an extensive study of law and business (MBA) students in an American university in which she used the concept of habitus developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Debra J. Schleef (2006: 21) showed that the key motivational factor for attending professional schools was students’ desire for “maintaining a possibly precarious class status.” As they internalized the tastes, values, context, and world view of their immediate family, they did not aspire to be professionals because of “an ardent interest or perceived aptitude in these fields,” but because of “a deep-seated economic source—the need for the credentials that provide the salary, prestige, and lifestyle attendant on the upper-middle class” (Schleef, 2006: 20). Things really had not changed that much from the late 1970s, when Richard P. Coleman and Lee Rainwater (1978) wrote that earning a substantial income was the principal determinant of career choice : “[t]he status attached to given schooling levels is a function of the realistic observations people make of how much money those in different educational categories actually earn” (qtd. in Brint, 1994: 42).

Professionalism amounted to “[t]he process of reproducing a class position” across generations; students “did not consider the advantages of a given occupation separate from its social class position” (Schleef, 2006: 20, 45, 202, 203). And once at their respective schools, they allowed themselves not only to be convinced to take career paths that were presented as “appropriate to their elite status,” but also to see such choices “as inevitable.” Students “modif[ied] [any] earlier entrepreneurial and anti-corporate attitudes to value more traditional big business goals,” easily moving “from the amorphous careers they were considering at entry to careers in investment banking, consulting, or corporate law in large firms.” Professionalism became a “remarkable” form of “class continuity,” where individuals, as they progressed in their chosen occupation, learned to embrace the logic, attitudes, choices, and procedures of that occupation so as to ensure that they remained within the social-class level to which they had become accustomed and to which they now had an even stronger personal allegiance.

— The politics of professionalism by Juris Dilevko

Though white women continue to be hindered by gender inequity in academic libraries, whiteness still enables them to access and wield hegemonic privilege and power. Such access, paired with the belief that professional success is the result of individual hard work and merit, lends itself to white feminist neoliberal thinking. As Deborah Hollis noted  nearly two decades ago, “the ‘good old boys’ are turning into the ‘good old girls,’” and this continued concentration of whiteness at the top solidifies an institutional structure predicated on marginalizing, assimilating, and/or silencing the “other.” White feminist leaders, for whom a commitment to social justice is an integral component of their cultivated progressive identity, use their authority to reinforce a professional culture that avoids or elides explicit discussions of race and racism.

— Topographies of Whiteness by Schlesselman-Tarango Gina

The slogan of "academic freedom" or "right to do research" does not mean freedom or rights for anybody or everybody to do what they please. Those who control the university control hiring and firing as well as research facilities. Government, big business and foundations friendly to them control the money and other resources necessary to do large-scale research. The same interests control most of the means of communication. In the final analysis, researchers can only do what they please as long as they please those who employ them and support their research. In reality, therefore, "academic freedom" and "night to do research" basically entail the "right" and "freedom" to serve imperialism -- and not the "freedom" or the "right" to fight it, to work against it.

— The Cambridge Project by Judy Kaufman, Bob Park, Betsy Useem, and 1 other (Page 48)