Beyond the dual-support system: Scholarship, research and teaching in the context of academic autonomy

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Abstract
The present dual-support system for teaching and research in universities is in decay for a number of reasons—the more selective funding policies adopted by the University Grants Committe and now the Universities Funding Council; the inability of universities to fund research overheads out of their routine budgets; the arbitrary exclusion of the polytechnics from dual-support funds; and the growth of research as a separate activity with its own career structure. But the dual-support system is more than a set of administrative and financial arrangements; it is also an authoritative statement about how universities see the relationship between research and teaching, and indeed a metaphor about the essential character of the academic enterprise. These arrangements suggest an enterprise that is organic, autonomous and also perhaps inward in its orientation. So in both administrative and normative senses the dual-support system is out-of-date. Various proposals have been made to reform it, including the introduction of a three-tier higher education system in which only those institutions in the top tier would be fully funded to undertake research and the separate allocation of funds for research and teaching. Like the dual-support system itself these various reforms must be assessed not simply in terms of their administrative appropriateness but their intellectual consequences.

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