Academic work : A tale of essential tension between research and teaching

Résumé En

during the last fifteen years, European reforms in higher education have introduced differentiation into the fabric of academia, and triggered transformations in academic careers even if the various scientific disciplines and generations of academic researchers have been unequally exposed to the main impact of these reforms, that of a pervasive growth of individual and institutional competition on a national and international scale. Competition alters the architecture of organizations, the principles underpinning the evaluation of academic work and workers, the coupling of teaching and research (Locke 2012), the incentive tools for scientific production, and the correlation between working conditions and salary levels. With increasing mobility of faculty and students, and with the whole industry of rankings, performance auditing and implementation of excellence frameworks, a growing value has been given to research activities, which are the most openly competitive. As a result, the reputation of a university's research has a far greater signalling value than the quality of its teaching mission. And research enjoys productivity gains that appear to be inaccessible to teaching, which, like other kinds of services undergoing rising costs and constant productivity, is subject to the "Baumol disease" (Baumol 1967). How is the functional link between teaching and research to be understood in a context of heightened competition between and within universities? We know that teaching in contact with advanced research has greater value than teaching which is distant from it, and which only passes on knowledge produced elsewhere (Price 1970; Cole 1983). We also know that the quality of academic research varies according to the quality of the PhD students involved. But are teaching and research tasks intrinsically complementary, to the extent that we could consider them as generating mutual gains? Or are they, on the contrary, sufficiently distinct to separate , which would imply that, were they not, academics would perform essentially conflicting roles within the same job? Or should they be separated endogenously, and not a priori, according to the various abilities people display, once they have been put to the test of academic professionalization and classified on the basis of the preferences, resources, and constraints determining each one's work and performance?