‘Eulogy to research’ as pandemic makes teaching the priority

Nearly two-thirds of UK academics say the coronavirus pandemic has led to universities reprioritising teaching over research, according to a survey, which also showed that staff felt financial considerations are being prioritised over their well-being.

Researchers analysed 1,099 responses to a survey exploring the impact of Covid-19 on academics’ professional lives and found a largely negative picture of how UK universities had managed the crisis.

The paper, forthcoming in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, found that 64 per cent of respondents reported “a reprioritisation of teaching over research”, which the authors said was “especially salient” as 66 per cent of respondents worked in research-intensive universities.

The crisis has heavily dented research revenue, while universities have had to expend significant effort on moving their teaching efforts online. Fifty-nine per cent of respondents reported that universities were increasingly uncoupling research from teaching and introducing more teaching-only jobs.

The researchers describe the responses as “a eulogy to research”, unless scholars work in Covid-related areas.

In the survey, 84 per cent of respondents reported having experienced an intensification of workload during the pandemic, and 78 per cent said they believed the crisis would result in an increase in temporary and casual forms of academic employment.

This contrasts with statements from sector groups, including the Russell Group, which recently called for long-term contracts to become the norm in research, warning that the “pressure of fixed-term contracts and job insecurity means we are losing people from the global academic talent pipeline”.

The survey also found that 81 per cent of respondents believed the crisis would damage the job prospects of early career researchers. Respondents described junior scholars “being exploited in regards to teaching” because they were being asked “to pick up” teaching duties without appropriate compensations.

Management came in for heavy criticism: 67 per cent of respondents believed the pandemic was being used as “a foil for exploitative practices”, or, in the case of 84 per cent of respondents, as a way to consolidate decision-making in centralised leadership teams.

Ninety-five per cent of academics said the pandemic would be used by universities to “legitimise cost-cutting initiatives”, such as closing taught programmes or even whole academic departments.

Sixty per cent of academics said the pandemic had weakened their professional autonomy, and 70 per cent said it had impaired their trust in university leadership.

The researchers point out that many of the problems highlighted by the survey were not new, particularly around job insecurity and marketisation, but have been exacerbated by the pandemic. “Covid-19 has, perhaps irreversibly and universally, worsened the long-established norms of academic employment,” they write.

Co-author Richard Watermeyer, professor of higher education at the University of Bristol, said the survey responses “painted a pretty depressing picture” of how university leadership had responded to the pandemic.

“We can’t escape the prospect of increased casualisation in tandem with role specialisation and, therefore, separation of research and teaching, not least where edtech and a swing to online provision – particularly in opening up to new international markets – affords universities an opportunity to invest less in or pay less for teaching personnel,” he said.

“People spoke very plainly and explicitly about the way in which universities were increasingly moving away from democratic forms of governance and the fact that Covid-19 was providing a foil for universities to push through a variety of different measures, especially cost-cutting measures.”

anna.mckie@timeshighereducation.com