How many universities and colleges are there (either on all of earth, the US, the EU or Japan, whichever stats someone can find) that are actively doing scientific research?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t every university conduct scientific research? Isn’t that what sets it apart from, say, a community college?
Webometrics lists 9,299 universities worldwide. That excludes institutions that do not have a web presence, though.
Would you want to try to define “scientific research”?
Oh, you’d like that wouldn’t you?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&oi=defmore&defl=en&q=define:Scientific+Research
I didn’t know every university and college conducted scientific research on the part of the professors. If it is I don’t know if that is just a US thing.
It’s valid to ask what you mean by ‘research’, let alone ‘scientific research’. In the UK, all universities and all academic staff are expected to be involved in research. And even apparently-non-scientific institutions such as art and music colleges will be working in some scientific fields. Some of the more contentious ideas about how higher education should be changed include suggestions that less-prominent universities should be able to focus solely on teaching, and that the funding should be in place that they can do this successfully, while leaving research to the big guys.
I didn’t know research was mandatory in all colleges & universities aside from community colleges. I am not sure if this is a global thing though.
Actually, far from it being the case that all academic staff in the UK are expected to be involved in research, one of the major consequences of the Research Assessment Exercise has been to create a formal distinction between those who are ‘research active’ and those who are not. Why? Because everyone accepts that many university lecturers, particularly those coming to the end of their careers, are excellent teachers, are keeping up with the literature but are not themselves doing significant research.
This is one of the paradoxes of the RAE. The process undoubtedly puts a premium on those lecturers who are ‘research active’, which is why this has become the main factor in appointments, but, equally, pressure from the lecturers got the rules modified so that those who were not active were exempted from the process.
APB - am I right in thinking that change to the RAE process was only made fairly recently?
No, the distinction was there from the beginning and, in fact, it was the earlier ones that placed the greatest emphasis on the ratios between the two groups. But the argument that this was too crude was always one of the major criticisms and so they increasingly played that down. The process thus became less an attempt to measure departments’ total research outputs and more to compare the quality of the research being done.
Of course, in all this there is the questionable assumption that only those who are publishing are doing research, although, to be fair, they have tried to address that criticism as well. As you’ve already pointed out, ‘research’ can be rather difficult to define.
I think that Wesley’s question may come from a distinction sometimes made in the U.S. between “research universities” and “liberal arts colleges” or “teaching-based colleges”.
There is a broad and fuzzy line dividing the two. On one side are large universities where the primary focus is on the faculty’s doing advanced reasearch in their fields, with the teaching efforts of the faculty is of less significance, on the theory that exposure to the leaders in a field is highly worthwhile whether or not they are the best of teachers. The other side is often smaller colleges where there is more focus on students having a personal relationship with professors who are more interested in teaching their subjects than being on the cutting edge of research. Obviously all schools have faculty that both do advanced research and teach superbly (and some that don’t do either well), but it can be a useful distinction to make.
I believe that I’ve also seen a classification like “Class I Research University” applied ot U.S. schools, but I don’t know what that means.