调查：英国1/5教授因教学获升职

The increasing equity between Education and Scholarship, or Teaching Focussed, paths alongside the more traditional Research focus or balanced paths is certainly to be welcomed. The next challenge for HEIs, who often have very and archaic structures, is to have similar transparent paths for 'non academic status' teaching and learning professionals. It is not unusual in my experience for there to be no promotion pathway at all for professional staff, let alone a transparent or accessible one.

How many of these teaching Professor are in fact managers who have done no teaching but just want to get a cheap Professor title? How many of the teaching professors are in second rate Universities and how many in the Russell group? Can we not give them another title like ProfessoT since they do not do any decent research?

Wow. Such sniping.

The pathway into the professoriate remains largely through achievement of research outcomes, but it is clear that facilitating the learning of others is increasingly recognised. Look a little deeper at the survey to see that role expectations have increased as well- this may be more significant as the average number of substantive roles is five: take your pick from: teaching, management, clinical work, doctoral supervision, administration and governance- as well as research. The ivory tower for research-only chairs is not only multicoloured, it may also be leaning!

Well, here we have another trend moving the values of the HE sector towards the corporate. I know quite a few deserving colleagues who did reasonably good research and great teaching gaining a chair. I can perhaps see the case for these being given a chair. I do note the part of the pie chart indicates 'other routes' at about 20%. This, I assume, is managey/administrator related promotions. This, like a knotweed metaphor, is a growth that strangles the genuine academic promotion route. No doubt, many readers have their own list of the utter duffers with little actual talent in the domains outlined above. In one institution I know of, someone with an abysmal teaching record, a very thin research output and no PI grants, rose to becoming a PVC. Once this dizzying promotion has been awarded, a professor ship followed in short order in their oruginal 'field'. This individual had had little genuine high level management experience and simply spouts whatever the UUK line is on any given topic. On balance I do not believe this trend serves the public and institutional good. It means duffers can be mistaken for someone who has made sustained and important contributions of real worth.

At the rate this is going, uni will basically be just another stage of secondary school. What all these people praising the new teaching-focused, corporate structure of British universities are failing to grasp, is that students benefit from taking classes from talented researchers. And conversely, talented academics agree to teach because they have freedom to pursue research. The system has worked well for centuries, as a way of advancing knowledge, and disseminating it to non academics through teaching. As we put more and more emphasis on teaching and pastoral care, piling on admin tasks and taking away time and resources for teaching, the implicit arrangement falls apart. Talented researchers will leave academia. Teachers who have no meaningful connection to research in their field will focus more on presentation than content. Already I can see students increasingly care about formats and marking criteria etc... than the actual content of the coursework. And increasingly, as their professors are just teachers rather than respected intellectuals, they're right to think this way.

What I've never understood about this is: presumably someone who gets a teaching-led promotion to professor does, like other professors, less actual teaching than a lecturer/senior lecturer? In which case how does this raise the status of teaching?