During the past 30 years, teacher training in Israel has undergone a revolution: the teaching profession has become academic, and since the mid-1980s all teachers were required to attend either an academic college of education or a university in order to acquire a bachelor's degree and a teacher's license. Yet, despite this process of academization, the teaching profession has found it difficult to establish itself as an academic field, and teachers constantly have to prove--to themselves, as well as to public opinion--that they are worthy of an academic status. This paper analyses the process of academization of teacher education in Israel, with special emphasis on the policies of the two chief actors in the field--the Ministry of Education and the Council for Higher Education--showing that they traditionally held contradictory perceptions of teachers and of the teaching profession, and that this source of conflict has slowed down the academization process and weakened the profession, thus preventing it from reaching its ultimate goal--the upgrading of the teaching profession.