‘Trailblazing’ research agendas linked to academic mobility

“Homegrown academics” who spend their entire career at the institution where they acquired their PhD are less likely to take on “trailblazing research agendas” compared to more mobile counterparts, according to a study of 7,000 academics from 140 countries.

A study in Higher Education Quarterly argues that the practice of “academic inbreeding” is “detrimental to the research aspirations, innovativeness, risk-taking and multidisciplinary engagement of academics’ research agendas”.

The authors, from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the University of Bergamo and ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, divided researchers into three types.

“Homegrown academics” (formerly known as “inbred academics”) lean towards “less trailblazing research agendas” by 6 percentage points. They tend to choose “safer” subjects, possibly because some “lack the necessary creativity, openness and exposition to external knowledge flows”.

Homegrown academics have research agendas that are 19.6 per cent less focused on “discovery” compared to more mobile academics. They also tend to be “less ambitious…in terms of trying to assume a position of authority in the field”.

“Silver corded” academics, who leave their alma mater temporarily and then return, are relatively more “competitive, independent and networked” than homegrown academics but still 4.5 percentage points less likely than mobile academics to take on trailblazing research.

“Mobile academics”, who make up the majority of the sample, work in a different institution from where they acquired their PhD. They are the most likely to have “trailblazing” agendas that lean towards “disruptive, multidisciplinary, collaborative and riskier knowledge processes”. They are less likely to have “cohesive” agendas that focus on one discipline and produce incremental research which confirms known knowledge.

Hugo Horta, an associate professor of education at HKU and one of the paper’s authors, told Times Higher Education that trailblazing research could be fostered by allowing greater academic autonomy and international mobility.

“It is also promoted by environments that are professionally and socially supported, where there are incentives and low penalties for risk-taking, and where thinking is on the long term rather than on short-term outputs,” he said.

The study states that academic inbreeding has “mostly subsided” in more developed systems like the UK and the US, aside from some “institutional clusters”.

However, Dr Horta called it a “growing pain” in less developed systems,

“Academic inbreeding tends to be more prevalent in developing countries – not only in Asia, but all over the world – because the phenomenon…is part of the development of HE systems,” he said.

Academic inbreeding may inevitable, or even helpful, in higher education systems in their “infancy”, when they are beginning to build research capacity and open PhD programmes.

But the practice becomes problematic later on, as it promotes “overemphasis on institutional knowledge and organisational identity, parochialism, nepotism and reinforcement of existing knowledge”, which are values “not attuned with the needs of contemporary science and HE”, Dr Horta said.  

joyce.lau@timeshighereducation.com