There is a misconception doing the rounds in Nepal, even among academics who are based in Kathmandu. Many of them seem to think that all higher education institutions (HEIs) outside of Nepal are, in essence, research-focused institutions. In this misconceived world, it is thought that the primary focus of such institutions is to generate new knowledge.

However, the reality is quite different. Take, for instance, the case of the US, which has dominated the research scene across social and natural sciences in the past 80 years. Currently, there are about 4000 HEIs in the country. According to what was originally known as the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (first created in 1970 and last updated in 2021), among them there are only 146 R1 category research universities with “very high research activity.” There are another 133 R2 category research universities with “high research activity.” More than 200 additional universities run doctoral research programmes including some two dozen “special focus research institutions” (e.g., institutions that only do medical research). When you add up these three numbers, the total is still under 500.

The above numbers suggest that roughly one in eight (less than 13 percent) American HEI is an institution primarily organised for research. Even then, it does not mean all faculty members therein do full-time research. They usually have to teach two to four courses each academic year.

What about the other around 3,500 HEIs in the US? Some research does happen in them mainly through the work of individual faculty members interested in knowledge production or occasionally through small groups of individuals interested in similar topics. The four-year colleges in this group of institutions also provide some research funding and occasional teaching-reliefs in the form of occasional semester-long or year-long sabbatical leaves. However, they are primarily teaching-oriented institutions where the job of the faculty is to teach undergraduate students. In such institutions, it is normal for individual faculty members to teach five to seven courses in an academic year. That is a significant load of teaching which does not leave a whole lot of time for the individual to do original research and writing. Such work is usually accomplished during the three-month summer breaks.

Those who work at primarily teaching institutions usually have research experience and a PhD degree. However, they work in an environment in which their teaching receives the highest priority in their performance evaluation. The second priority is for service toward the institutions where they work (namely, serving in various faculty committees). Third in the priority order comes their research publications. Extending beyond the US, most HEIs worldwide are teaching institutions.

Lessons for our universities

In several of my previous columns, I have argued that Nepal needs many more universities. Moreover, I have suggested that the new universities should be relatively small ones, enrolling 1,000 to 3,000 students per institution. I have also asserted that we need a plural landscape of higher education consisting of a variety of universities. In such a landscape, a handful of institutions could be devoted to research across several disciplines, enrolling only MPhil and PhD level students; others could be single-theme research universities (e.g., agriculture-related research university). However, most of the HEIs in our plural landscape should be primarily teaching institutions. Why?

The first reason is that it is very difficult to organise and operate research universities anywhere but especially in Nepal. Research does not happen in a vacuum. It requires that groups of academics agree on some basic fundamentals of everyday practice including the possibility for cordial but critical conversations, organisation of regular seminars, provision for mutual feedback on each other’s work, and publication outlets staffed by editors who can manage rigorous peer review. The existing universities in our country are mostly devoid of these characters even though they are staffed by faculty with various records of published research.

The kind of working environment for researchers mentioned above cannot be bought in a supermarket and is not available online. It needs to be nurtured from the ground up. Universities badly damaged by political bhagbanda and led by deans and rectors who have not published anything significant in their disciplines cannot patiently nurture such an environment.

Second, it is very expensive to organise and run research universities. Researchers in R1 and R2 universities in the US do their work with support from grants from various federal agencies, private foundations and money provided by their own institutions (which is derived from income generated from their endowments). While public money goes to most of Nepal’s universities, the portion of such support for research is grossly inadequate. There is virtually no private sector assistance for research, and our universities do not yet have endowments that aid research. Faculty members can compete for internationally available funds, but these tend to be extremely competitive. Even if they are secured, they can only be relied upon to support short-term research projects.

The main reason why most of our HEIs must be teaching institutions is because that is where the most need is. Nepali students arriving in our colleges, even those from better schools, have very poor reading and even worse writing skills. I have never formally taught such students in our country but those who have tell me that more than anything else, these college students need to learn to read properly and write critically. In my encounters with such students in public forums, it is clear that many of them have not learned to engage critically with what was presented by the speaker.

In my journal and book editing experiences over the past three decades, I have encountered many bad pieces of writing by our college graduates (by the time they wrote the pieces I read, they also had MA or MPhil degrees). It is obvious that they were never taught the skills of writing an 800-word book review, a 2,000-word commentary or a 6,000-word research article. People are not born with excellent reading and writing skills. However, they can be taught such skills in colleges provided that such institutions are committed to this idea as a mission.

Also faculty members who get hired in such institutions will need a lot of training to be better teachers. Hence, such institutions will also have to figure out ways to provide needed support for their teaching faculty members. To say all of the above is not to say that there should be no place for research at our teaching-focused HEIs. Faculty members can engage in such research, but that should not be their first priority.

Each existing Nepali HEI and the new ones that will be opened in the future should declare clearly what kind of priority teaching will receive in their institutions. If research is not their priority, then academics interested in research and less on teaching will have to join other institutions.