Why Do Universities Encourage Faculty and Students to Conduct Research?

Why Ask Faculty and Students to Do Research at All?

Faculty already teach, advise students, design courses, assess learning, perform service, and carry administrative responsibilities. Students already have classes, assignments, examinations, and other academic demands. Research adds another activity that requires time, supervision, expertise, infrastructure, and often funding.

Why, then, do universities encourage both groups to conduct research?

One answer is institutional: universities may have research as part of their mission and need active researchers to sustain that function. Another is educational: participation in research can help students learn how knowledge is produced rather than encountering knowledge only after it has been settled into textbooks and lectures. Faculty research can also maintain scholarly expertise and create environments in which students encounter current questions and methods.

These purposes overlap, but faculty research and student research should not simply be treated as interchangeable sources of institutional output.

Universities Encourage Research for Both Scholarly and Educational Reasons

Faculty and Students Participate in Research for Different but Connected Reasons

Universities Are Places Where Knowledge Can Be Produced as Well as Taught

One reason universities support research is that higher education can involve both transmitting existing knowledge and contributing to its development. Faculty researchers test ideas, produce evidence, develop methods, interpret phenomena, and participate in scholarly conversations within their fields.

The balance differs among institutions. Research-intensive universities may maintain extensive doctoral programs, laboratories, research centers, grant portfolios, and dedicated research staff. Other universities may focus primarily on teaching while supporting selected faculty scholarship and student research. Neither model means every institution must pursue the same amount or kind of research.

The 2025 Carnegie framework in the United States makes this diversity particularly visible. Research Activity Designations are now separate from the broader Institutional Classification and include Research 1, Research 2, and Research Colleges and Universities. Carnegie explicitly notes that research activity can be undertaken in whatever way an institution chooses to further its mission.

Faculty Research Can Maintain Active Scholarly Engagement

Faculty members who conduct research continue interacting with unanswered questions, current evidence, methodological developments, scholarly debate, and peer communities. This can help sustain expertise beyond the knowledge needed to deliver established course content.

The U.S. National Science Foundation's Research in Undergraduate Institutions program provides a particularly explicit statement of this rationale. It supports high-quality faculty research at predominantly undergraduate institutions, seeks to strengthen departmental research environments, and promotes integration of research and undergraduate education. NSF describes support for faculty research as a way of maintaining faculty members' intellectual vibrancy in classrooms and research communities.

This does not establish that every productive researcher is necessarily an excellent teacher. Research expertise and teaching expertise overlap only partly. The more defensible claim is that active research can provide faculty members with continuing engagement in how knowledge in their fields is generated, challenged, and revised.

Student Research Can Turn Knowledge Into a Process

Students often encounter knowledge in finished form. Textbooks summarize findings. Lectures explain accepted concepts. Laboratory exercises may have expected outcomes. Research changes the intellectual situation because the answer is not completely known in advance.

Participating in authentic research can require students to formulate questions, engage with literature, select or learn methods, work with evidence, confront ambiguity, revise assumptions, communicate findings, and recognize the limitations of what can be concluded.

The NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates program reflects this educational rationale. It supports intensive undergraduate participation in NSF-funded areas of research and explicitly emphasizes integrating research and education while attracting students into STEM careers.

Student Research Can Help Develop Future Researchers

Research participation can also function as early researcher formation. Students may discover whether they enjoy research, develop methodological competence, learn research ethics and norms, work with mentors, participate in research teams, and become better prepared for graduate or research-intensive professional study.

This function becomes even more explicit in graduate and doctoral education, where conducting original research may be a central requirement. Universities with advanced research programs therefore need active research environments not merely to generate institutional outputs but also to train people capable of conducting future research.

This is one reason research can strengthen graduate and postgraduate education when appropriate supervision, infrastructure, scholarly communities, and research opportunities are available.

Faculty Research Can Create Opportunities for Students

Faculty research can provide projects into which students enter as research assistants, thesis students, laboratory members, field researchers, data analysts, or collaborators. Students may gain access to equipment, datasets, external partners, research questions, and methodological expertise that would be difficult to create independently.

NSF's Research Experiences for Undergraduates program includes both dedicated REU Sites and supplements that allow students to participate in new or ongoing NSF-funded research projects. This illustrates a practical model in which faculty research infrastructure becomes an educational opportunity for students.

The connection is not automatic, however. A university can have substantial research activity while many students have little direct contact with it. Whether research enriches education depends partly on how opportunities are designed and distributed.

Research Can Connect Teaching With Current Knowledge

Faculty engaged in research may bring contemporary debates, unresolved problems, current methods, authentic datasets, and examples from ongoing inquiry into teaching. Students can then encounter a discipline not merely as a body of conclusions but as a field in which claims remain open to investigation.

Yet universities should avoid the simplistic assumption that more faculty research necessarily produces better classroom teaching. Heavy research demands can compete with teaching time, and excellent teaching requires its own expertise. The relationship between university research and teaching therefore depends on how the two activities are organized and connected.

Research Can Address Problems Relevant to the University's Communities

Universities may encourage faculty and student research because their expertise can be applied to problems faced by professions, industries, government agencies, schools, healthcare organizations, communities, or other groups.

Students participating in such research may encounter the practical and ethical complexities of applying academic knowledge. Faculty may develop long-term partnerships that generate new questions, data, educational opportunities, and pathways for research use.

Local relevance should not be treated as a requirement for all research. Basic and theoretical inquiry can be legitimate without an immediate practical application. Institutional portfolios can reasonably contain different kinds of research.

Faculty Research Can Build Institutional Research Capacity

Universities need more than individual researchers if they want research activity to be sustained. Research may require laboratories, libraries, software, data systems, ethics review, grant administration, research governance, technical personnel, mentorship structures, and collaborative networks.

Faculty projects can help create and maintain these capabilities. Students trained within those projects may later become postgraduate researchers, research staff, or faculty members themselves. Over time, research activity can therefore contribute to an institutional ecosystem rather than a collection of unrelated studies.

This connects directly with building institutional research capacity.

Research Can Support Funding and External Partnerships

Faculty expertise and active research programs can create opportunities for competitive grants, commissioned research, industry collaboration, government partnerships, philanthropic support, and inter-university projects. Student participation may be incorporated into some of these activities.

External resources can expand what an institution is capable of studying, but funding should not become the sole rationale for research. Grant income is a resource and, in some settings, an indicator of research activity. It is not a direct measure of the quality or importance of every resulting study.

Research Can Contribute to Institutional Reputation and External Assessment

Universities also operate within environments where research is externally visible. Research activity may affect institutional classifications, accreditation or quality-assurance processes in some jurisdictions, and university rankings. The exact role differs among systems and should always be verified from the relevant authority's current methodology.

For example, the 2025 Carnegie Research Activity Designations in the United States use research and development expenditure and research-doctorate production. This classification is intended to describe research activity and should not be confused with accreditation or a comprehensive judgment of university quality.

Likewise, global ranking systems may incorporate research-related indicators, but ranking performance is a different institutional objective from producing valuable research. Universities should be careful not to reverse the relationship and conduct research merely because an external metric rewards it.

Faculty and Student Research Should Not Be Expected to Produce Identical Outcomes

These distinctions are especially important when universities create research targets. Treating a novice undergraduate and an established faculty researcher as equivalent units of research production misunderstands the developmental purpose of student research.

Research Requirements Need Educational Justification

Some programs require students to complete theses, dissertations, capstone studies, or other research projects. A requirement should have a clear educational rationale: what should students know or be able to do differently because they completed the research?

If students conduct research only because a program requires an output, the institution risks turning research into an exercise in compliance. Appropriate supervision, methodological preparation, ethical safeguards, feasible scope, and meaningful feedback become essential.

Similarly, faculty research requirements should be realistic relative to workload, resources, disciplinary practices, and institutional mission. Encouraging research without providing the conditions necessary to conduct it well can transform a scholarly objective into pressure to produce whatever satisfies the requirement most efficiently.

One Faculty Project Can Serve Research and Educational Purposes

The project serves several purposes without requiring every participant to receive the same outcome. The undergraduate experience can be educationally valuable even if the students do not become authors. The graduate researcher can develop independence. Faculty can advance a research program. The institution can gain knowledge and capacity.

Problems arise when these purposes are collapsed into one metric, such as simply asking how many publications the project generated.

Common Misunderstandings About Faculty and Student Research

Research Expectations Should Match the Researcher's Role and the University's Purpose

A university should be able to explain why it asks a particular group to conduct research. “Because research is important” is not enough. The intended outcome should shape the opportunity, resources, supervision, and assessment.

The broader benefits that research can provide to universities and research institutions are most likely to emerge when faculty and student research are designed for clear purposes rather than treated simply as additional units of institutional production.

Before Encouraging More Research, Clarify Why

Questions About Why Universities Encourage Research

Universities Should Encourage Research for Clear Reasons, Not Simply More Research

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