Public engagement should be ‘protected in academic contracts’

Public engagement should be incorporated into academics’ contracts, according to a new paper that found that a growing teaching-research divide is squeezing out the “third mission” of universities.

“Finding balance in the triple nexus of research, teaching and public engagement” argues that public engagement can act as a “productive site for co-creation, enabling reciprocal flows between research inquiry, teaching practice and societal need”. 

It is also beneficial to undergraduate students, the paper argues, who may gain “employability skills” by engaging in modules and research projects which involve the wider public.  

However, the paper, based on interviews with STEM academics in Scotland, found that embedding engagement as a “third mission” alongside the traditional functions of a university is “challenging, especially when there is a dearth of support in some institutional settings”. 

“Despite rhetorical recognition within institutions and departments that public engagement can positively impact teaching and learning this is still left as a discrete activity or ‘bolt-on’,” one participant said. 

The paper adds that the differences between pre- and post-92 universities are “significant” when it comes to striking the balance between research and teaching, which “undoubtedly” affected participants’ capacity to get involved with public engagement.

“All of those who were working at post-92 universities felt they had little or no support to pursue their own research interest,” the paper outlines.

One respondent noted that the differing levels of permanent and temporary contracts at institutions also impacted a university’s ability to conduct public engagement, and another told researchers that, “increasingly, recruitment strategies in post-92 universities tend to look to hire staff specialising either in lecturing or research, which can act as a barrier to achieving unity between teaching and research”.

The paper argues that the “successful normalisation” of public engagement alongside teaching and research “requires policy-level protections for explicit workload recognition”.

Report author Lucy Beattie, a researcher at the James Hutton Institute, told Times Higher Education that there needed to be greater contractual protections for academics to allow them to work on research, teaching and public engagement amid the sector’s growing workload complaints.

The “research-teaching nexus is precarious already” as “there’s no protected time” for research in their contract, she said.

“I think that there should be a review of how university contracts are constructed and actually allow people protected time for each of these activities, regardless of whether they’re a research-intensive or a teaching-intensive. All these different aspects bring about interchangeable skills which can really help to develop someone as a whole researcher.”

The paper follows recently released data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, which found that levels of public engagement are declining, with levels down in 2024-25 by 3 per cent on the year before, and 11 per cent on 2022-23.

Academics said that the fall in public engagement was not down to declining enthusiasm, but to workload pressures, with one saying it is increasingly being marginalised as a “non-core activity”.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com