The study, led by Cecilie Johanne Slokvik Hansen of the University of Bergen together with Kjetil Egelandsdal and Marit Ulvik, does not ask whether teaching and research are connected, a question that has fuelled decades of statistical meta-analyses with mixed results. Instead, the researchers ask something more subtle: how does the connection between teaching and research survive as a meaningful, taken-for-granted part of what it means to be a professor, even as organisational arrangements increasingly pull the two activities apart? The answer, they find, lies in the shared beliefs and habits of academics themselves, beliefs that are now being strained by course structures, workload models, funding mechanisms and the rise of research-only positions.

To explore this, the team conducted semi-structured interviews lasting between seventy and one hundred thirty minutes with sixteen associate and full professors, four from each of the four disciplines. Participants had worked in university positions for anywhere from four to more than thirty years, and their formal allocations of research time varied considerably, from twenty-five to fifty percent in philosophy, mathematics and law, to just twenty percent university positions alongside clinical practice for medical professors. The researchers analysed the transcripts using a phenomenological approach rooted in the sociology of knowledge, drawing on concepts such as typification, sedimented knowledge and objectification to understand how shared meanings about academic work are built, maintained and, potentially, eroded.

What emerged was a strikingly consistent picture across all four disciplines. Professors described research-based teaching not simply as a way of delivering up-to-date content, but as a way of inhabiting the academic role itself. A philosophy professor explained that being a researcher means looking at things in a completely different way than if you were just repeating something. A law professor said that being an active researcher in the field she teaches allows her to gain a much deeper understanding and elaborate on specific issues to a far greater extent than if she were not. Medical professors emphasised that long periods without engaging in research risk eroding the ability to question what is held as truth, with one noting that completing a doctorate gave them a humbler relationship to what the truth is.

Perhaps most strikingly, professors across all four disciplines described teaching and research as intertwined ways of thinking and working within a shared field of knowledge rather than as separate tasks bundled into the same job. A law professor observed that those who practice law work with exactly the same method as researchers do, with the difference lying only in the level of requirements, accuracy and thoroughness. A mathematician noted that although mathematics is an old discipline, the course portfolio must constantly be renewed, with the content of undergraduate courses in continuous development over twenty years. In medicine, professors described how research, clinical practice and teaching continuously intersect, allowing them to offer students reflections on what knowledge is now, what it might be in twenty years, and where we stand today, not as fixed truth but as something that evolves.

Teaching and supervision also emerged as shared disciplinary spaces where professors and students meet around common intellectual questions. Law professors described monthly lunches with students as a possibility for getting an academic community, calling it a win-win. Philosophy professors spoke of seminars as opportunities to test things out with students and have discussions with them, with one recalling publishing an article after two students confronted him with his interpretation of a text during an introductory course. A mathematics professor insisted that supervision is research, describing weekly hour-long conversations as really fun. In medicine, teaching in the clinic was described as a collective endeavour where students participate in understanding clinical situations together with their mentors.

Yet alongside these affirmations of the teaching-research nexus, the interviews revealed a growing set of organisational conditions that make the ideal increasingly difficult to enact. Professors in philosophy, mathematics and law frequently described teaching compulsory courses misaligned with their own specialised research. A law professor explained that international law covers everything from the law of war to passport issues, making it lucky to have half an hour for his own field in a five-day course. In philosophy, elective courses once shaped by individual interests have been reduced due to limited budgets, with one professor recalling that seminars in his student days could focus on a single book, something that today would be seen as too specialised. In mathematics, funding models tied to student numbers mean courses depend on income rather than expertise, with teaching described as the department’s bread and butter.

The pressures extend beyond course design. Professors described increasing demands to apply for externally funded projects, with large-scale grants leading to buyouts from teaching. One mathematician reported being bought out of teaching for much of the year, while another highlighted how researcher-only positions created for project work cause a headache, with permanent researchers who are not allowed to teach. Administrative systems, intensified student administration, altered course structures, reduced research time and the expansion of teaching-only and research-only positions all contributed to a widening gap between the two activities. These developments did not necessarily weaken professors’ belief in the value of combining teaching and research, but they made it progressively harder to practise.

The researchers interpret these findings through three theoretical concepts. Typification refers to the shared understanding of the academic role as one in which teaching and research belong together, giving the nexus legitimacy even when everyday arrangements make it hard to realise. Sedimented knowledge captures how this understanding has become historically embedded in academic practices and taken for granted over time, rooted in the Humboldtian tradition and codified in Norwegian legislation and university strategies. Objectification describes how shared meanings become institutionalised in course plans, workload models, funding schemes and teaching routines, so that over time, new organisational arrangements can reshape what professors come to see as the normal way academic work is organised.

The study’s authors argue that this is not simply a gap between values and practice, but a process through which changing organisational arrangements reshape the meanings available to academics. The teaching-research nexus remains meaningful, they conclude, but fragile. Professors continue to draw on a typified and sedimented understanding of academic work as combining teaching and research, while the conditions under which this combination can be enacted are shifting beneath them. The researchers suggest that institutional efforts to sustain the nexus need to consider how workload models, course structures, funding mechanisms and differentiated academic positions shape the opportunities professors actually have to live the ideal they still believe in. The study is limited to sixteen interviews within one national context and does not support statistical generalisation, but its interpretative findings offer a transferable lens for understanding how academics everywhere are navigating the tension between what they believe academic work should be and what their institutions increasingly allow it to become.

Subject of Research: How university professors sustain and experience the teaching-research nexus under changing organisational conditions

Article Title: The teaching-research nexus under pressure: sustaining ideals in uneven and changing times across disciplines

Article References: Hansen, C. J. S., Egelandsdal, K., & Ulvik, M. (2026). The teaching-research nexus under pressure: sustaining ideals in uneven and changing times across disciplines. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 1888722. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1888722

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1888722

Keywords: teaching-research nexus, higher education, academic identity, research-based teaching, qualitative interviews, Norwegian universities, academic workload, neoliberalism, disciplinary culture, supervision, professor role, organisational change

The emotional weight of the finding is captured in the words of one participant, given the pseudonym Jo, who admitted she would never identify herself as an education-focused academic. Her concealment reflected a belief that colleagues would regard her as less legitimate than research-active peers. Far from being exceptional, similar accounts emerged repeatedly across the four universities in the study, which included a research-intensive Group of Eight institution, a member of the Australian Technology Network, an Innovative Research University, and a regional university from the Regional Universities Network. Despite their differences, the experiences reported by education-focused staff were strikingly consistent.

Education-focused roles have expanded rapidly across Australian higher education and now represent the fastest growing segment of the academic workforce. They allow academics to concentrate on teaching, curriculum innovation and educational leadership with little or no expectation of disciplinary research, and in a growing number of universities they provide a promotion pathway to full professor based on educational achievement. Comparable tracks have emerged in the United Kingdom, Canada and Singapore, driven by massification of student enrolments, declining government funding and rising expectations of educational quality. Yet, as the new study shows, formal recognition has not translated into cultural acceptance.

To explain why, the study turns to neo-institutional theory, a framework which holds that organisations are governed by taken-for-granted assumptions about what counts as appropriate and legitimate behaviour. Within higher education, the dominant institutional logic has long been anchored in the teaching-research nexus, the idealised model of the academic as someone who combines teaching with an active disciplinary research profile. Although the empirical relationship between research excellence and teaching quality is weak and historically contingent, research remains the primary marker of academic status, embedded in promotion criteria, workload models, funding systems and informal judgements about academic worth.

Against that backdrop, the study identifies a recurring institutional identity category: the education-focused academic as the ‘failed researcher’. Within this framework, an academic’s focus on teaching and student learning is interpreted not as specialisation but as deviation from the research-active norm. Participants from all four universities described how colleagues assumed that people entered education-focused roles because they could not succeed as traditional researchers. One teaching-and-research academic at a regional university remarked that there were no other roles available and that they did not know anyone who would choose an education-focused appointment, while another described teaching-focused staff as being ‘on a production line smashing out students’, performing standardised repetitive tasks rather than creative intellectual work.

The reality described by the education-focused participants themselves was radically different. They entered their roles through varied pathways, from clinical practice and school teaching to journalism and postdoctoral research, and for varied reasons, including securing continuing employment, passion for teaching, and a desire to prepare the next generation of professionals. One participant spoke of thinking about assessment design while others thought about research while washing dishes; another described the appointment as an alignment of stars, with her classroom serving as her laboratory. This diversity of motivations and expertise, the study argues, directly challenges the empirical validity of the ‘failed researcher’ conception, which reduces a rich spectrum of careers to a single narrative of research failure.

The study shows that the label is not sustained by individual attitudes alone but is enacted through organisational structures and everyday practice. Recognition and reward systems privileged research while rendering educational achievement invisible: one education-focused academic who had won two national awards for university teaching noted that these counted for nothing at her institution, while researchers winning large grants were celebrated on the website banner. Workload arrangements sent similar signals, with teaching relief granted to researchers winning grants implying that teaching was a punishment and research the valued activity. Promotion processes, leadership structures and casual collegial interactions repeatedly communicated that research represented the highest form of academic contribution, even where formal policies recognised education-focused careers.

The consequences extended into daily life and self-perception. Many participants reported reluctance to disclose their education-focused status, and one senior leader recounted that when education-focused staff in a public forum were asked to raise their hands, none did. More overt exclusion was also reported, with one participant told to their face that some colleagues regarded a role without research as belonging to only half an academic. For some, the stigma was internalised: one education-focused senior lecturer described feeling like an illegitimate academic who had never felt like an expert. The study also found a paradox of resistance: education-focused academics who sought legitimacy through the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning often succeeded locally, but only by translating their work into terms already recognised by research-centric cultures, leaving broader assumptions largely intact.

The consistency of these accounts across four very different universities points, the author argues, to institutional isomorphism, the process by which organisations in the same field grow alike as they respond to shared norms and sources of legitimacy. Australian universities compete within a sector where research performance, funding, rankings and international benchmarking underwrite organisational prestige, so research-centred understandings of academic value persist not merely as local preference but as a sectoral expectation of what a successful university looks like. Within such a field, treating education-focused academics as fully equal can itself appear counter-normative, meaning the delegitimisation of teaching specialists becomes, in effect, a legitimate organisational response.

Yet the study concludes that the ‘failed researcher’ narrative is becoming impossible to sustain. It is empirically weak, contradicted by the diverse achievements of education-focused staff; conceptually shaky, given the weak link between research performance and teaching quality; and organisationally contradictory, because universities now rely on these academics to deliver core educational missions while simultaneously undermining their legitimacy. The real question, the paper suggests, is no longer whether education-focused academics are legitimate, since universities have already answered that by creating and promoting their career pathways, but whether institutional cultures have adapted to that reality. In many cases, they have not, and the marginalisation of teaching specialists reflects institutional logics that have lagged behind the transformation of academic work itself.

Subject of Research: Institutional construction of perceived illegitimacy and marginalisation among education-focused academics in Australian universities

Article Title: The ‘failed researcher’ – perceptions of illegitimacy and the marginalisation of education focused academics in Australia

Article References: Fleischner, C. (2026). The ‘failed researcher’ – perceptions of illegitimacy and the marginalisation of education focused academics in Australia. Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-026-01767-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10734-026-01767-2

Keywords: education-focused academics, higher education, academic identity, academic legitimacy, teaching-focused roles, neo-institutional theory, Australian universities, academic workforce, marginalisation, teaching-research nexus, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, academic promotion