Stars who can't find the time to teach

With an ever greater emphasis being put on research, is university teaching being affected?

Received wisdom has it that research and teaching have a symbiotic relationship in higher education. They are two different organisms but they exist in intimate association and to one another's mutual benefit. But do they? The question is relevant as the United Kingdom struggles to decide what kind of higher education system it needs at the end of the millennium, and as academics prepare frenziedly for the next Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in 2001. That exercise produces the league table of heavy hitters in research, and determines the lion's share of research funding.

The fact is that academic life is dominated as never before by the need to produce research for publication in learned journals so that departments may shine in the RAE and bring universities lots of lovely lucre. The Higher Education Funding Council may argue that the purpose of the RAE is to concentrate research in selected institutions and departments, but its effect has been to push everyone into a mad scramble for research money, leaving teaching as the Cinderella.

Academics who are no good at research are being ruthlessly axed. Queen's College Belfast, for example, has been engaged in such pruning; Queen Mary and Westfield in London is pondering a similar exercise. It does not seem to matter whether academics can teach. What counts is research. We are seeing the same phenomenon here as in America: students choose a university with a glittering reputation for research in a subject, but arrive to find they are being taught by postgraduate teaching assistants because the glitzy academics are preoccupied with - you guessed it - research.

Back in the 1960s, Lord Robbins gave voice to the conventional view that teaching and research were all of a piece. Higher education institutions gained "intellectual and spiritual vitality" from research, and lecturers benefited from communicating their findings to students. "Publication is itself a form of teaching, and many scholars acknowledge that their published work has gained much from the discipline of the lecture, the class, and the tutorial," he said. The Robbins view has held sway for much of the past 30 years, and still does.

Professor John Pratt, director of the centre for institutional studies at the University of East London, reinterprets it for students of new universities. Because they will become practitioners in a changing world, they need basic skills, and inquiring and flexible minds, to advance knowledge and practice - and they will only learn these things from being taught by teachers who have engaged in investigation of some kind. "If you're going to be genuinely convincing and effective as a teacher, you've got to have some experience of advancing knowledge or practice in your own right," he says.

Not all countries think this way, however. In France, research is largely concentrated in a national centre, and in institutes called "grands organismes", not in universities; in Germany it is spread out between universities and a wide range of other organisations; and in the US it is conducted in relatively few universities, and in research institutes.

The problem is that the job of a university teacher has never been defined, says Eric Robinson, author of the seminal Penguin book The New Polytechnics. Junior lecturers simply find that their career and promotion prospects depend on research, not teaching. "The idea that good teaching depends on doing research is unproved," he explains. "Obviously, sometimes it does enormously enhance teaching to have done original work in a subject. If you're teaching how to write a novel, it helps to have written one.

"Equally, some research is a bloody waste of time. A lot of it is phoney, self-serving, and there's an obsession with status, which is inimical to teaching. Some research can be positively harmful, narrowing the mind rather than broadening it."

Probably the most outspoken of the UK experts questioning the link between teaching and research, Robinson advocates a rethink on where research is best done. Another critic - Professor Iain McNay of Greenwich University - says it is often enough for teachers of undergraduates to simply keep up with the literature in their subject. All critics are winning increased support, because of what are seen as the damaging effects of the Research Assessment Exercise.

Professor Graham Gibbs, co-director of the Centre for Higher Education Practice at the Open University, says: "There have been a large number of research studies which compare academics' excellence as researchers with their excellence as teachers. There is no correlation between the two at all. The evidence is absolutely clear-cut. Students don't do any worse or any better if they are taught by someone who is an excellent researcher. In fact, recent studies have shown a negative correlation, so that the better you are as a researcher, the worse as a teacher."

One academic, Professor Lewis Elton, of University College London, has drawn a distinction between research and scholarship. He argues that scholarship - understanding and knowing your subject profoundly - is necessary for teaching. It also helps research. But it is not measured.

New research from Oxford Brookes University - the first study to ask students what they thought - is shedding light on the issue. It found that students were ambivalent about their lecturers doing research: they liked the fact that it meant they were up-to-date and enthusiastic about their subject; they also liked the glitter it brought to their department. But they didn't like it when their lecturers weren't available because they were busy with research; nor did they like the feeling that research was something separate from them, and over which they were not consulted.

"The students in our focus groups saw clear benefits from staff involvement in research," explains Professor Alan Jenkins of Oxford Brookes. "This really hit me. Also the more highly rated the department for research, the more the positive judgements went up. What they were concerned with were staff absences, staff not being available; you could argue they were concerned about how the research was managed."

The findings led Professor Jenkins to change his views on the connection between research and teaching. He had been sceptical. Now he sees more value in the link. The findings also led Oxford Brookes - through its strategic plan, and through a big university-wide conference - to strengthen that link.

Roger Brown, principal of Southampton Institute and former head of the now-defunct Higher Education Quality Council, says: "I am basically sceptical of the claims that are made about the link - or I was until I saw the Oxford Brookes study. I now accept that there are benefits of having research and teaching in the same institution. The difficulty is that research is an uneasy bedfellow."

He agrees with Professor Jenkins and his colleagues at Oxford Brookes that tabs should be kept on staff to ensure their research is not adversely affecting students; that students should have the chance to be involved in academic research; and that research should be monitored to see how it can be fed into teaching. He is introducing penalties and incentives at Southampton Institute to encourage academics to involve students in research.

At national level, a number of initiatives are trying to tip the balance back towards teaching. The Higher Education Funding Council is aware of the problem; and the setting up of the new Institute for Learning and Teaching is another sign of change. The problem is that these bodies are battling against an institutionalised reward system (research brings money and promotion), and an academic culture which values research way above teaching.

It is because of this culture that puts research at the top of the pecking order, and the love that academics have for their subjects, that Dr Stephen Rowland, director of Sheffield University's higher education research centre, believes the way to turn them on to teaching is to engage them in the philosophy of their subjects. "Most people come to universities to intellectually engage with something," he argues. "Teaching needs to be seen as something of equivalent intellectual interest rather than just a chore."

The big question is how much emphasis we want universities to place on teaching and research in these days of mass higher education. The balance will differ from place to place. What might suit University College London, with its traditions of research and scholarship, might not be right for a new university such as Oxford Brookes, or indeed, for Liverpool Hope, an institute of higher education.

But it is clear that British institutions can get a grip on research - and are beginning to do so. In America, where the research culture has neglected undergraduate teaching even more than in the United Kingdom, and for a longer period, things have begun to happen. Research universities have become conscious of the need to ensure research feeds in to undergraduate learning. And the prestigious National Science Foundation is insisting that researchers will only get grants if undergraduates benefit.

DOES RESEARCH GET IN

THE WAY OF TEACHING?

New research from Oxford Brookes University - the first study to ask students what they thought - has found that students were ambivalent about their lecturers doing research.

Here are some of their views:

"On the whole it's brilliant, because they're obviously showing some interest. They're still keeping up to date instead of stagnating and saying: `I'm now teaching and I'm going to run this lecture every year on the same date from the same script'."

"We just don't know what they're up to... It's not something we're told... It's only from things that they've let slip in the lectures."

"I'd rather be taught by a lecturer who's done research than by one who hasn't."

"There are about three lecturers who have it on their doors: `Do not disturb. I'm doing research on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.' Lecturers should realise that they're there to work with students."

"If we knew a little more about what they had to do, we might be more gracious and let them get on with it."