‘But some people want, or are naturally more suited for, teaching’. I remember that sentence well. It was right before the pandemic. This was not exactly common knowledge, but my department was trying to move some people currently on research and teaching (T&R) contracts to teaching-only contracts.

The unspoken backdrop to this was, of course, the Research Excellence Framework (REF). Most of us in the UK would rather forget all about the REF. But to those who live in blissful ignorance of its existence, REF is the latest version of the UK’s research assessment exercise. The first was introduced by Thatcher in 1986. Although the marketisation of higher education is usually associated with the introduction and increase of domestic student fees, the assessment of universities (alongside the introduction of fees for international students) already laid the ground for the market logic of competition, replacing a system of stable block grants distributed by the University Grants Committee with a system of selective funding based on research ‘quality’. It was the first of its kind, providing a template for the globalization of ‘performance-based research funding systems’ across the world. In that sense, most academics will in fact be already familiar with some iteration of the REF.

So far, REF rules have changed with every assessment cycle. At the time, the REF2021 submissions consisted of 65% research outputs (i.e. publications), 20% impact (i.e. case studies demonstrating tangible impact) and 15% research environment. Contrary to previous exercises, universities could not select who to submit to REF but had to submit at least one output (and a maximum of five) from every research-active member of staff. Some colleagues, a handful I imagine, were considered to fall short of that requirement either because they hadn’t published, or because their publications were not judged by the university as meeting the REF criteria of being ‘world leading’ 4* or 3* outputs. Submitting them would likely make the university’s overall submission less competitive. Teaching-only contracts solved the problem by ensuring that they did not qualify as ‘research active’. Clearly, it was more about gaming the system than about any alleged 'virtue' of such contracts, let alone about fulfilling the ‘wishes’ of the said individuals.

The Institutionalisation of the Teaching-Only Contract

At the time, I had tried to make the point that if some people genuinely wanted to focus only on teaching or if the department considered a member of staff was not fulfilling their contractual obligations in terms of research, then the situation could, and should, be addressed on an ad hoc basis. There were many reasons one’s research output could have been ‘weaker’ in any given period, including, in fact, the ambition of the research project. The majority of people still enter academia hoping to undertake both teaching and research. In fact, the PhD is a far better preparation for the latter than it is for the former. I also warned that such a practice would function mainly as a disciplining tool, adding to the ‘publish or perish’ anxiety that many already incredibly productive scholars are feeling, particularly early career scholars (ECSs).

I also worried, however, about the longer-term institutional risks. Teaching-only contracts were not new. But my fear was that, in the age of REF, TEF (the Teaching Excellence Framework) and growing financial pressures, they would quickly become institutionalised as a separate career path with very deleterious effects (divisions among staff, stratification if not hierarchisation between those on teaching-only contracts and those ‘good’ enough to be granted time to conduct research in a sector that is already highly hierarchised).

A few years down the line, I was proven right. In fact, after I finalised this piece, I found out that the Teaching and Scholarship vs Teaching and Research framework may have already been in place by 2016. In my university, the contracts are named ‘teaching and scholarship’ (T&S) (‘teaching-only’ evidently has too pejorative undertones) with ‘scholarship’ including publications and activities concerned with pedagogy (as if these can be easily distinguished from research). At other universities, they are sometimes referred to as ‘teaching and education’. Although the introduction of a new workload allocation model has made exact comparisons more difficult, T&S contracts still involve roughly twice the teaching load of a T&R contract. Under the old model, that  would have been 12 hours a week rather than the six hours typical of T&R contracts. Many positions advertised by my department in the last two to three years have been T&S contracts (with the latest round including the institutionalisation of yet another career path: T&PP contracts i.e. ‘teaching and professional practice’) and they have coincided with a sharp increase in student numbers (it is a law school).  

Wither the Early Research Career?

Without wishing to devalue the important work those appointed on such contracts are doing, in the current broader landscape of higher education, the institutionalisation and growth of T&S contracts is having worse effects than I anticipated. Let’s begin with ECSs. Universities have long relied and still do on a vulnerable precariat to carry out a good chunk of their teaching activities. These short-term contracts have not only proliferated but also taken different forms over time: ‘associate lecturers’, ‘fellows’, ‘teaching fellows’, ‘teaching associates’, whatever label can lend an official gloss to uncertainty, insecurity and exploitation. Some nominally included research time, but even then, their conditions often made it very difficult to carry out research (I was under a contract that included research but involved a minimum of 12 hours teaching a week at my previous university). Their widespread use has always fed on the increasingly unfulfilled promise of a permanent job – ‘it will look good on your CV’, ‘it will give you experience’, ‘if you do a good job, you might be in a stronger position when a proper position comes out’ – in a job market that is increasingly unable to absorb doctoral graduates.

T&S contracts invert that logic: you get the permanence, but not the (academic) job. Economic security makes them attractive, but they lock many aspiring researchers into a vicious circle. Everybody in the humanities and social sciences knows that, particularly these days, you need at least a few publications in peer-reviewed journals, if not a book, to secure a permanent academic position. Yet, buried under hours of teaching (often outside their expertise), fighting for time for research (that is increasingly hard to find even for those on T&R contracts) that goes unrewarded (if not actively discouraged), and faced with a probation, appraisal and promotion scheme that requires active engagement with non-research activities, such publications struggle to see the light of day. If they do emerge, they come at a huge emotional and physical cost. Thus, if the traditional bargain was ‘accept precarity now in the hope of eventually securing a permanent job’, the new bargain is ‘accept permanence now by foregoing the research dimension of the job’. Research, in other words, is traded for permanence.  

Wither Research-Led Teaching?

Let’s talk also about research-led teaching, a term that many of us took for granted but that these developments have now put right in the middle of debates around pedagogy and the educational role of the university. There are admittedly many possible definitions of the term. An exceedingly narrow one, and the one my department seems to have implicitly endorsed, is that research-led teaching is teaching about one’s own work which is often described as ‘niche’. What is wrong with that, one may ask, if student demand is there? But one need not even venture down this path, for, in truth, the definition gets even the basics wrong. Teaching our own research is rarely enough to run an entire course and is in practice incorporated into a broader theme and range of materials. In addition, research-led teaching often works the opposite way round: academics use teaching to learn about and broaden their understanding of a subject for future research (teaching is researching). Few human rights lawyers worked on AI a handful of years ago, yet courses on AI and human rights are proliferating.

Which leads to another point. In its broader, richer sense, research-led teaching is living, evolving teaching: teaching that incorporates new findings, new questions, new topics, that stays alive to society and its concerns and, one would also assume, students’ interests. But doesn’t that understanding imply that T&S contracts pose no threat to research-led teaching? Not quite. Research-led teaching requires time. Time that is already squeezed in traditional T&R contracts and that will likely all but disappear in the interstices of T&S contracts.

In reality, the narrow reading of research-led teaching sits well with the cost-cutting agenda of senior managements, who have readily embraced ill-researched and ill-conceived advice produced by highly paid consultancy groups: that students need less choice, that they are overwhelmed by too much information and that their mental health is at stake. In that context, slashing ‘niche’ (i.e. non-essential) research-led optional courses or even entire specialised programmes is surely the way to go?

Wither Independent Research?

Let us now finally turn to ‘research’. The introduction of T&S seems to have been at least partly driven by the pursuit of research excellence (i.e. read also competition for better rankings), at least when measured in terms of REF performance. But the effect has hardly, as we might already suspect, been to enhance investment in research. On the contrary, the development of the teaching position (expressed in the form of the T&S contract) is now also being accompanied by what I would call the ‘Strategic Research and Teaching’ (SR&T) position.

The language of ‘strategic research’ has some formal antecedents. A few years ago, several universities introduced periodic competitive calls for positions that would include ‘protected’ research time (i.e. less or no teaching) at least for the first few years: we called these ‘strategic lectureships’, but elsewhere they bore the name of ‘chancellor’s’ or ‘vice-chancellor’s fellowships’. These positions were advertised across all disciplines and typically required the research to fall within a few areas of ‘strategic priority’ to the relevant university. At least in mine, the hope was that those appointed would not only conduct excellent individual research but would also collaborate in developing ambitious ‘new’ research agendas, grant applications, and broader institutional strategies.

These research-only contracts, however, are not what I have in mind when I speak of the SR&T position. Unsurprisingly, given the financial investment required, in my university, the scheme was discontinued after two rounds and judging from regular checks of job.ac.uk, the same is true of other places. Yet, the logic of ‘strategic research’ has not only remained; it has been generalised, albeit with a twist. Indeed, the SR&T position does not buy you ‘more’ research time. Rather, it is making what used to be independent research in traditional T&R contracts conditional upon being ‘strategic’: research that aligns with the priorities of senior managements or those of another body which is willing to fund it.

For now, the SR&T position does not yet have a formal contractual expression: most of us continue to be employed under a T&R contract which typically allocates 40% of our labour time to research with no formal conditions attached (although in my department this moved to a 45/40/15 split and several universities have significantly reduced the time allotted to independent research). But it is already latent in the new expectations around research. The old bargain was: ‘publish (excellent ‘REFable’) research or perish/teach’. Now it has been extended to: ‘serve our institutional priorities (grants, rankings, strategic priorities, partnerships, impact) or perish/teach (the latter if you happen to be in a department with ‘healthy’ student numbers)’. This trend may not mark the end of ‘research’, but it would entail a radical reconfiguration of its nature and social function.  

The (imbalanced) two-tiered future of the university

That brings me to the two-tier university. The two-tier university that we see unfolding in some places slowly splits the university into two halves and redirects its activities around two previously interconnected spheres: (mass) education (and an army of teachers) on the one hand, and (strategic) research (and a handful of researchers) on the other. The driving force? Money. HE is not formally a profit-driven sector, but it has certainly become a surplus-driven sector: when institutions foresee financial difficulties, what is at stake is not necessarily a risk of deficit per se, but of projected reduction of the overall surplus. Cost-cutting has been one response to this, as is plain from the many redundancies and/or threats of redundancies unfolding throughout the sector. The two-tier university may become another such strategy. Extracting more labour/value from academics is notoriously difficult. Academics already work long hours and at full capacity. But the logic of the two-tier system is precisely to maximise extraction: either you contribute more to teaching and help bring student numbers up (read: cash flows) or you bring in more money through research grants or partnerships. Either way, the assumption is that traditional ‘T&R’ contracts are no longer good value for money.

Under this model, teaching evolves into a form of mass pedagogy increasingly divorced from the needs of society and the cultivation of critical thinking, reduced to a box-ticking exercise on the road to a depleted job market (AI is only likely to exacerbate that). Research stops being part of the university’s core mission and persists primarily in the form of strategic research: as conditional contractual right or externally funded privilege.

Divisions among staff deepen, workload and cortisol levels rise, and the unity and energy needed for resistance drops. In the face of the profound crisis facing the sector, perhaps challenging the internal fracturing of the university should not be a priority. Still, as we know, crises are also opportunities for governments, managers and capitalist interests to roll out longer-term changes. At my institution, modules and programmes are being slashed, new workload allocation models and terms of employment are pushed with no consultation, to mention but a few of the changes. Resistance to redundancies should therefore come hand in hand with resistance to the less visible mutations the sector is undergoing. Otherwise, even if we come out on the other side, it might not be to the jobs we thought we had.