Teaching-Focused Academics Branded ‘Failed Researchers’ in Australian Universities, Study Finds

Inside Australian universities, a quiet crisis of identity is unfolding. A new study of four contrasting institutions has revealed that academics appointed to education-focused roles, positions created to elevate teaching and student learning, are routinely perceived as illegitimate members of the academy, branded with the damaging label of the ‘failed researcher’. The research, published in the journal Higher Education, draws on interviews with 62 staff across universities of very different missions and histories, and finds that this stigma is not a local quirk but a sector-wide pattern sustained by deep institutional logics. The author, Collins Fleischner of the School of Education at Australian Catholic University, argues that the perception is not only unjust but increasingly untenable in a higher education landscape that increasingly depends on teaching specialists.

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