One of the fiercest advocates of research-informed teaching has softened his stance, saying pressures on funding may necessitate a partial retreat from Humboldtian principles.

Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt said the Humboldtian tradition ¨C where education is informed by research ¨C was an important concept for research-intensive universities. ¡°But I don¡¯t think every university needs to be research-intensive,¡± he told?Times Higher Education. ¡°And we need to come to terms with that.

¡°If you¡¯re an institution that is trying to create research leaders, that teaching is most effectively done through the Humboldtian model. But 90 per cent of the students who need a university education are not going to be research leaders. Our system is sort of designed around a false premise that we are all research-intensive.¡±

Professor Schmidt is believed to be the only serving university leader with a Nobel Prize, after sharing the 2011 gong for physics. Addressing the 2018?Times Higher Education?World Academic Summit, he?warned?that backing off from research-led teaching was the start of a slippery slope.

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A wholesale adoption of teaching-only academics would sever the teaching-research nexus and trigger a ¡°dangerous and unsustainable¡± cycle where future students would be ¡°completely decoupled from the research of the day¡±, he told the event in Singapore.

But, speaking on the sidelines of the 2020 Universities Australia conference in Canberra, Professor Schmidt said that the sector had reached an ¡°uncomfortable state¡±.

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¡°Once you start having a cycle where you¡¯re not being taught by the people at the bleeding edge, you just dumb the whole system down,¡± he said. ¡°Getting that balance right [is] a problem. We need to produce research leaders, and research-led teaching is important for that, but it¡¯s not important for the average graduate. That¡¯s the challenge.¡±

Chairing a panel at the Canberra conference examining higher education policy, Professor Schmidt asked whether it was now ¡°reasonable¡­to expect everyone in the university to be applying for research grants¡±. He questioned the ¡°return on investment to the nation¡± when people generated 100-plus page applications for grants they had less than a one-in-five chance of securing.

¡°I subscribe to the notion of a Humboldtian university at least for some universities. But if you¡¯re going to train 300,000 domestic students, do all of them need that? Do we need to reset our sights and say there¡¯s research-led teaching and there¡¯s non-research-led teaching? Because research-led teaching is expensive,¡± he said.

Andrew Norton, professor in the practice of higher education at ANU, said that university teaching warranted respect as a profession in its own right. But that suggestion encountered ¡°huge cultural and industrial resistance¡± within universities.

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¡°It¡¯s almost as if [academics] accept the precariousness and maybe the low pay of academia because you get to do interesting research on the side,¡± Professor Norton told the conference. ¡°A teaching-only academic, despite what [some] universities might say, is probably not regarded by colleagues as at quite the same level as a research-only or teaching and research academic.¡±

Professor Schmidt said that teaching-only liberal arts colleges in the US also suffered a ¡°prestige¡± problem. ¡°People aren¡¯t going there,¡± he said. ¡°The market seems to be misaligned.

¡°We need to somehow get into the zeitgeist of the population that a really good education like that is also incredibly valuable. We¡¯ve got to get around the idea of prestige being the research-intensives.¡±

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com