Writing and Education: The Value of Reconciling Teaching and Research

For much of the twentieth century, academic research needed little explanation. Governments and corporations accepted that universities delivered both education and research outcomes under well-established disciplinary headings: mathematics, physics, biological sciences, classics, art history, literary criticism, et al. Other kinds of tertiary institutions offered other kinds of education in a wide range of fields, including in the creative arts, but research was neither required nor expected in these settings. This began to change in the later decades of the twentieth century when, in Australasia and the UK, governments initiated tertiary education reforms that brought the schools of art, design and writing under the rubric of the academy, and hence under the requirement to operate as academics rather than as teachers in ateliers. Elsewhere in the world too, many staff within those practical and craft-based schools came under increasing pressure to perform like academics: namely, to hold doctorates; to supervise research students; and to report their own research outputs. The immediate effect was a clash of cultures as creative arts schools attempted to find a place within the university system, and the established academic disciplines attempted to accommodate the world of imagination and the sometimes idiosyncratic production of creative works.