More teaching and less research, Australian universities tell staff

"some seasoned academics are said to do very little teaching, interpreting academic freedom as the right to research whatever they like.". Successful research academics are successful because they know better than anyone else what is most significant. Curiosity driven research is fundamental to basic research. Without basic research, applied research grinds to a halt. No matter the weasel words, government/bureaucrats cannot escape this truism.

The article ignores completely the reality of the teaching-research distribution. The general model has been that business schools take ever increasing numbers of foreign students (more than 60% of the students from overseas study business) and this is where the cash flows from (the article makes it seem that the distribution is uniform across campus, which is nowhere near the reality). When I was @ the AGSM and we were integrated into UNSW, we immediately had our revenues taxed at 50%. The business schools contribute billions into university coffers with some being taxed at 70% of revenues. What this means is that research in other departments gets subsidized by teaching in the business school. So those b-school academics teaching classes of 100+ people or higher numbers of sections (some with 90%+ of the students being from overseas) have long been doing so, enabling that academics in other fields to keep teaching seminars with small numbers of students and doing their research, when an 'every tub on its own bottom' common in US universities would force each faculty to be a self-enclosed financial entity. So in an odd way, the pandemic is a blessing that is forcing non-business school faculties to wake up to the reality of who has been working to pay for their research and lower teaching loads for decades.