Imagine you are in charge of an army. You want the troops to go north. What do you do?
You order the troops to go north.
Now you’re in charge of a university. You want the academics to refocus their energies on the priorities of society. You want more industry engagement, better teaching and a better student experience, and more public outreach. You issue orders and wait.
How come you are still waiting?
Because, of course, universities are not like the army. Here I must confess that even “the army” is not like my imaginary army. It is much harder to lead than I imply above. But you get the point. In universities the line management culture is loose at best.
One reason is that many academics feel as if they are self-employed, and that their success depends on judgements by external granting agencies and journal editors, rather by their university.
During most of my career the main driver of academic success has been research and specifically the ability to secure external grant funding. If an individual gets a lot of funding, they are likely to outperform their peers in producing papers, attracting research students and fellows, and ultimately they gain a reputation for excellence.
The usual research metrics (grant dollars, papers/citations, research student completions) are understood across the world. People with good “metrics” often secure continuing positions, gaining further advantages, and may even become a target for head-hunting and start up offers in new places that increase their capabilities further. Given the insecurity and competition in academia, being productive in research became a cherished goal.
Accordingly, there were few reasons for academics to deviate from focussing on research.
What’s more, institutional incentives and individual incentives aligned here. Universities that win the most research funding, see it used to publish important work, and move up the league tables, since the tables have primarily reflected research outputs. So, both institutions and Individual academics prioritised securing research funding.
Some consider this quest for grant funding as a lust for money, but it’s not. This is ‘money in, money out’. The grants are used to do the research, but because the grants don’t fund the on-costs (libraries, labs, IT infrastructure, compliance etc), grants actually cost universities money. Nevertheless, universities love grants because they underpin success at the individual and institutional level.
To shift the balance, one can’t just bang on about how important other things are. No one needs convincing that industry engagement, teaching and the student experience, and public outreach are important. Academics agree but they can’t drop their lifeline and focus on these things, unless they are provided with another lifeline: recognition (e.g. status), reward, and security when they shift.
In fact, I bet each university already has academics who would prefer to engage with industry, contribute to teaching and the student experience, or communicate with the public, but these people can’t risk reprioritising their efforts unless they are supported.
I’ve watched things evolve at my own institution. Given the pride in engineering at UNSW, the culture does, to my mind, naturally recognize contributions to industry engagement. There is a ‘start up’ and ‘innovation’ culture. We have top professors who are respected for research translation. Interestingly, there has also been a good history of public outreach and science communication. We have reached the stage where these things are self-perpetuating.
The situation with teaching and the student experience was different. We’ve always had some stand out teachers, but I am not sure they’ve felt supported. Some faced insecurity as they were not ‘research active’, and others were on sessional contracts. Achievements in teaching and the student experience were invisible as student feedback was derided as flawed and biased, and little other data on contributions was visible at an institutional, let alone a global level. Even if one was a highly appreciated teacher, there were few opportunities to be recognized or supported outside the classroom or the department.
Specific steps were taken to provide recognition, reward, and security. We offered Education Focussed (EF) positions (with no expectations around research) and now have a cross-university community of 500 people who are interested in teaching as a career. About 40 of the most admired are fellows of our Scientia Education Academy.
Extending the teaching year via the trimester meant we could appoint academics to ongoing EF roles rather than sessional roles. We have peer review of teaching. We have databases of the student experience. We call these MyExperience surveys to show they do not measure teaching quality but a student’s experience. We acknowledge the limitations in the data. Details are available to managers, and graphs on each Course (where no single teacher can be identified) are visible to all students and staff.
We support staff to apply for fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (Advance HE), we provide professional development, including the Teacher Accelerator Program (TAP) to welcome new teachers, and have a calendar of events. We have visiting teaching fellows, internal teaching fellowships, and grants for developing teaching.
Importantly, we have also established many new awards, including the 2 minute teaching tip videos, student choice awards, internal Faculty and University awards, and we support applications for national awards – all these awards and all this data can rightly decorate CVs in perpetuity, and give staff ‘career’ confidence if they ever have to move interstate or abroad.
In short, there is now a road to the north, but most importantly, supplies are available to support the troops who want to head in that direction. Line management and empty rhetoric seldom works well in universities, but redirecting support programs can work.
Professor Merlin Crossley is DVCA (Academic Quality) at UNSW
