Specialist teaching and epistemic trust: rethinking advanced-level teaching in post-pandemic higher education

The point of departure for this paper is a question that debates about the academic workforce persistently obscure: not whether teaching-focused roles are legitimate, but whether advanced-level curricula can remain intellectually alive when universities treat module delivery as interchangeable. Writing from the United Kingdom as a critical case of internationally convergent pressures of unbundling, casualisation and workload intensification, the paper argues that the growth of teaching-focused posts is a scholarly good, and that the real problem is the weakening alignment between live disciplinary engagement and the epistemic demands of advanced teaching. Rejecting the empirically weak claim that research productivity improves teaching, it grounds specialist teaching in epistemic trust, introduces curriculum succession fragility, a vulnerability manufactured as much by employment precarity as by curriculum design, and proposes a stewardship model that allocates advanced teaching to live disciplinary engagement wherever it resides, whatever the contract.