Scholarship, research and teaching: A view from the social sciences

ABSTRACT It is now common in policy-making circles to argue that teaching in higher education can be sound without back-up from staff engagement in research; and, in particular, that the country cannot afford to widen student access substantially unless provision for research is uncoupled from provision for teaching, and limited to a small number of select institutions. The paper challenges proposals of this kind for institutional concentration of research provision. It argues, first, that such a policy would accentuate a hierarchy of provision for higher education in a pattern that would effectively, even if not intentionally, reinforce social inequalities of opportunity. It argues, second, that it would frustrate the larger purposes of widening student access. Those purposes, the author suggests, should not be just to spread established knowledge and current skills more widely. They should be also, and equally, to spread alertness of minds to today's uncertainties and tomorrow's changes. Advanced teaching tuned to the latter purpose requires engagement of staff at large—though not of every individual teacher equally or all the time—in active critical enquiry and exploration: that is, in research of some kind, and certainly in the ‘scholarship˚s which should be common to both research and advanced teaching and which makes the two conceptually indivisible. Even though this argument may have most transparent force in respect of social science and arts, the author believes that it should apply in general principle to all disciplines, as well as to both sectors of higher education. There are good reasons, underlined in the paper, why the prospect of wider student access should prompt re-examination of the relationship between research and teaching, and encourage both greater priority and more career-credit for teaching. But such reappraisal, the author suggests, should take effect within institutions, across the whole range of higher education; not by segregation of functions between institutions.