VARIABLES INSEPARABLE IN HIGHER EDUCATION: TEACHING AND RESEARCH

There are so many false dichotomies (e.g. nature vs. nurture, process vs. product, curiosity vs. utility, theory vs. practice, unity vs. diversity etc.) in higher education as there are in other domains. When forced to make a choice between these bipolar options one most probably may disconcert the option in favor and tend to make the other unacceptable. Teaching and research are the reasons of having universities and being an academician in a university. No university can excel by expelling the teaching function. No matter how a professor pretend preferring research option over teaching they yearn for shining in the auditorium. “Teaching vs. research” as a global false dichotomy will be the focus of this study. A modest but very universal evidence is revealing itself in world university rankings in every year. It is not deniable that university rankings are not well taken by intellectuals. They contempt the ranking criteria for being inappropriate and irrelevant for the social, moral, and academic values prevalent at universities. They severely criticize the exploitation of competitive, market driven potentials of universities. So many eminent scholars display their sense of humor by labeling these ranking ritual as “University Olympics” or as “horse race”. It is obvious that such a contest propagates the profitable positions of high rank universities. Fortunately egalitarian values still reign supreme in higher education. However equality does not necessitate justice. Justice requires discrimination when needed. It is impossible to ignore the existence of collegial hierarchy. The diversity is a reality among the universities in every country. Neither the students nor the researchers are all alike. Their uneven aptitudes and proficiencies result with ordered categories. These and many other facts compel the ranking culture to endure despite the opposing criticisms mentioned before. As a matter of fact it is impossible to omit the inter-institutional differences. Instead of resisting the comparative information one can exploit it for the common concern or at least to reinforce the curiosity. Times Higher Education (THE) World University Ranking summarizes annual performances of prominent universities all around the world since 2012. Ranking criteria involves Teaching, Research, Citations International Outlook, and Industrial Income with differential weights. THE collects evidence from the publications within the period of 2011-2017, and the citations they received from the Scopus database. These include books, book chapters, and conference proceedings. The purpose of this study is to display the correlations between the variables used as criteria to rank the world universities for 2018. It has been hypothesized that Pearson product moment correlations will be found as to be significantly high and positive. Moreover the correlation between Teaching and Research will be the highest one among all the other paired criteria in every different context. This finding is not sufficient but necessary evidence to assert that Teaching and Research do not alternate but reinforce each other in higher education. Inseparability of teaching and research cannot only be attributed to quantitative auto-correlation which can be attenuated by using partial-correlations. Therefore this simple index delineates the indivisible, inseparable qualitative bond between these conjugate qualities.