Permeability is the buzzword of Paul Nurse’s recent Independent Review of the UK’s Research, Development and Innovation Organisational Landscape, which describes the cultural change needed to tackle today’s most challenging problems. Professor Nurse tells us universities need more permeable ‘spaces’ to allow people, skills, and ideas to flow across the siloed structures of ‘disciplines’, ‘departments’, ‘schools’, and ‘faculties’, as well as between universities and industry. Two additional words, ‘collaboration’ and ‘inclusion’, make clear that Nurse is envisaging deep culture change.
But how do we make this happen in local as well as more structural ways?
The Humanities Research Institute at Newcastle University is testing one solution by tackling another silo: the compartmentalisation of research and teaching. Of course, research and teaching already inform each other. We routinely describe our teaching as ‘research-led’ and train our students to become independent researchers. Such teaching is inevitably discipline-specific since this is the beginning of academic training. The question is: what happens next? How does one move from disciplinary training to interdisciplinary collaborations? And since, if we are honest, we are all learning how to do this, how does one foster a culture whereby researchers – students and lecturers – work together to tackle global challenges?
