Richard Neale
was a suggestion in the workshop that those with a very
good research record may not be treated quite as harshly for
poor teaching as those who did not.
The governmental constraints on courses would indicate that
there is probably quite a lot of ‘the scholarship of integration’
within the teaching, with direct input of the academics own
work in final year first degree and higher degree work.
Finally, there is quite extensive ‘scholarship of application’,
with most of the people I spoke to being engaged in exter-
nal work. To quote one of the Deans:
China is now a state and market economy and this
will influence course content and student
employment. The Government is trying to create
an innovative society, and also recognises the
importance of multidisciplinary research, but they
are pursuing these aims cautiously.
This presents opportunities for management skills transfer
into growing enterprises and also for economic advice, and
socially there is a need for practical research into the issues
raised by China’s ageing population. The Beijing Olympics
2008 was beginning to dominate Beijing, and examples of
involvement from those I met ranged from electric buses to
a review of the infrastructure of Beijing for disability access.
4. What could be done to enhance the
linkages for the benefit of the students
and possibly the communities that the
University serves?
I have drawn a fairly polarised picture of Bit: it pursues aca-
demic research at a very high level, which dominates the
success criteria and rewards systems; at the other end of the
scale, it operates a quite rigorous system of teaching quality
control. I am sure that this polarity will continue and perhaps
increase, but between these poles is a system of applied
research and consultancy which seems to be regulated in a
quite fluid way.
Academic staff at Bit can, in some cases, take most of the
income, and they engage directly with real-life issues. They do
seem to be in demand by Government, industry and com-
mercial firms, and there is not the rigorous delineation and
regulation of these activities that we have at Glamorgan.
Most of the academic staff I spoke to said that some of this
work found its way into their teaching, in ways stated above
(examples, direct involvement by the students etc). There was
also general agreement that this work resulted in deeper
knowledge, confidence and personal satisfaction.
Discussion and conclusions
UK universities and many universities in China are driven by
similar external and internal influences and the institutions and
their staff have a similar diversity of academic aims and values.
I felt on familiar ground in most of the discussions and I was
reassured to find that, within the obvious limitations of this
study, the issues that we discuss at the University of Glamorgan
are not peculiar to us or indeed to other universities in the UK
with which I am familiar. Jenkins and Healy’s structuring of the
dimensions of the research-teaching nexus (Figure 1) was par-
ticularly apt and useful, and Barnet’s point that not everyone
needs to research personally found resonance in a substantial
number of academics. There was a strong correlation between
the traditions, cultures and rewards systems between high-level
‘research-leading’ Chinese universities such as Bit and those of
the UK Russell Group.
Although excellence in teaching and research were of crucial
importance, there were no obvious, consistent and institution-
led linkages between them; again I was on familiar ground.
Elton provides the authoritative quotation:
It has become increasingly clear over the past
decade that the question of a positive link
between research and teaching has no simple or
general answer.
Elton (2001, p43)
Thus, although some clear ideas about how teaching and
research should interrelate can be derived and broad com-
monalities seem apparent in both the UK and China, it is
perhaps at the local, institutional level that decisions need to
be made that reflect each university’s particular research and
teaching needs. It was enlightening to find that a leading
Chinese university, which operates within quite different sys-
tems and cultures from the UK, nevertheless has similar
issues, imperatives and problems—all the external and inter-
nal pressures listed in the Introduction were apparent. One
contrasting feature though, is one of emphasis: Chinese aca-
demics are more strongly motivated to do research than those
in the UK because they receive substantial financial rewards,
and the management of teaching performance is much
stronger and the penalties quite severe.
My overall conclusion is that there is international agreement
that research performance underpins the credibility of aca-
demic staff to teach at a university, which is after all the
pinnacle of the educational hierarchy (as emphasised by the
Welsh word for university, ‘prifysgol’, which means ‘first
school’). This credibility in turn attracts good students and
research staff—it is part of ‘the brand’. I have also discovered
that Boyer’s four-part definition of ‘scholarship’ is both rele-
Journal of Applied Research in Higher Education
Volume 1 • Number 1 • 80