Teaching AND Research: Symbiosis or Psychosis?

Generally, teaching position in a university entails among others the responsibility of an academician to do research. The reason is understandable. Lecturers need to keep abreast of latest development of knowledge out there, and explore new potentials therein, by research. It is almost like a symbiotic existence where one realm benefit from the existence of the other. However, currently the symbiosis has developed into something else. No longer a symbiosis, but rather a root of psychosis among academia.

This can be attributed to the fact that, research is not simply about enhancing knowledge in university anymore but is a mechanism for a university to maintain repute. Now to do research, Academics has to get certain amount of grants. Failing to achieve certain value of which will affect his year end appraisal. Secondly, output of the grant must achieve certain quality that requires no small effort and endeavour on behalf of the academics. The findings must be published in specific publication format, so specific if they do not achieve the quality, again their appraisal will suffer a setback. Both of these would be not a problem for a researcher doing full time research or perhaps in some disciplines where the research fit that requirements. For a teaching academic, however, the setup is rather a cause for distress.

This version of research results in many crisis in higher educations. Lecturers feel the stress trying to balance between teaching and research. Why the stress? Shouldn't they take research in a stride that will enhance his reputation as a scholar? Yes they should, but the definition of research today is not conducive to the concept. The definition and process of doing research in a university has become so skewed that it starts to create psychoses among lecturers. 

To give an example, even for a small grant, to manage it in a university ecosystem, requires fulfilling many procedures, form filling, reporting and auditing that amount to the responsibilities of a CEO of a small company. This is not helped by the bureaucratic processes and red tapes characteristic of a university management. Research no longer  resembles the act of digging a mine of knowledge to be disseminated in the classrooms, but rather a 24/7 machine that churn out certain numbers to feed evaluation metrics of the researchers as well as helping to push the reputation of the university through some skewed ranking system. In producing the output, they have to come up with scientific publication normally found in natural science, that it excludes a large channel of epistemological development especially with regards to arts and humanities. Such mode of knowledge generation does not translate automatically into good input for students. Often such writings are too technical and mechanistic that even scholars of different areas have difficulty reading.

There are evidence of negative impact of academics turning their focus on research as the more important career advancement tool. This can be seen in the number of complaints from students that lecturers are hands-offing teaching, relegating duties to research assistants or remotely attached to the act of teaching. This is against the notion that research should enhance teaching. Among lecturers, complaints of stress and exhaustion.

Research should be done in the university, yes, to help feed students with the latest knowledge out there. Nevertheless today it has developed into a different beast that it is now turning into a source of psychotic element in academia.