Indian academia operates on a foundational fiction that every university faculty member is, at once, a brilliant researcher and an inspired teacher. This assumption, baked into hiring norms, promotion criteria, and institutional rankings, is actively damaging higher education in India and is simply unrealistic.The university system today demands that anyone wishing to build a career as a college teacher must first earn a PhD, then continuously publish research to qualify for increments and career advancement. While the logic may seem reasonable on the surface, in practice, it produces a quiet catastrophe.AdvertisementTeaching and research are distinct vocations, each demanding a different temperament, a different set of skills, and a different relationship with knowledge. A researcher must possess the patience to sit with uncertainty, the rigour to challenge existing ideas, and the drive to produce original thought; often in isolation, over years. A good teacher, by contrast, must be able to break complex ideas into digestible parts, hold a room, adapt to different learners, sustain curiosity in young minds, and build a course that has pedagogical coherence. There is no reason to assume these qualities naturally coexist in the same person. It is, in fact, rather rare.By forcing every faculty member to do research, we have created a perverse incentive structure. Those who are natural teachers but lack research aptitude are compelled to produce academic papers regardless. The result is a flood of substandard research and a thriving predatory journal industry that profits from it. Journals that charge a fee and publish without meaningful peer review are not a fringe phenomenon in India. They are a structural response to a structural demand. Add to this the well-documented trade in PhD degrees and ghost-written dissertations, and what emerges is an ecosystem of institutionalised academic dishonesty sustained by a system that asks people to do what they are not built to do.Also Read | Savitribai Phule Pune University to conduct workshop on avoiding predatory journalsThe flip side is equally damaging. Researchers, those genuinely engaged in the production of knowledge, are poorly served by mandatory full-time teaching loads. Good research demands uninterrupted time to read, to think, to write, to revise. A teaching-heavy semester fractures exactly this kind of time. Researchers also face evaluation pressures tied to their classroom performance, creating disincentives that are both unfair and counterproductive. Meanwhile, students in their classes suffer, not because researchers are bad people, but because standing before undergraduates and explaining the basics of a discipline, with patience and skill, is simply not what many of them do well or wish to do.AdvertisementThe question of institutional rankings adds another layer. University rankings, both domestic and global, heavily rely on research output. These pressure institutions to require all faculty to publish, regardless of their actual role or skill set. Institutions have even adopted policies that structurally prefer quantity over quality, also termed as a focus on “bibliometric output”, and encourage unethical research practices, including unwarranted institutional self-citations and dubious collaborations. As Kishore Paknikar has rightly noted, this unhelpful race to win the rankings game has resulted in the adoption of “research strategies [that] tilt toward publication counts rather than conceptual depth.” Due to this, many Indian and global institutions continue to boycott such rankings, as reported by The Indian Express recently. Rankings must be reformed to incorporate teaching quality metrics adequately and bring more transparency to their evaluation parameters, but that is a longer battle. In the interim, India’s universities need a structural separation between teaching and research tracks.Must Read | Why are those with the fortitude to clear JEE breaking down?Such a division of labour is not radical. Many countries maintain lecturer or teaching-track positions for those who are gifted educators, while research-track positions are reserved for those whose primary contribution is knowledge production. Crucially, both tracks must be seen as equally legitimate and equally rewarded. Neither should be considered a lesser calling.With this structural change must come a reform of entry requirements. Those entering academia through the research track must demonstrate research capability — a PhD, yes, but one judged on the quality of ideas, not the quantity of publications. Those entering through the teaching track, however, should not be required to hold a PhD. What they must hold is a rigorous certification in pedagogy. Unlike school teachers, university lecturers receive no formal training in how to design a course, structure a lecture, engage a diverse classroom, or assess learning outcomes. The assumption that subject-matter knowledge automatically translates into teaching ability has no basis in evidence. The UGC-NET, as currently structured, tests neither; it is a relic that needs fundamental reimagining.you may likeThis does not mean researchers and teachers must live in entirely separate worlds. Researchers can enrich undergraduate education through elective courses, seminar series, or guest lectures, formats that allow them to share their work without bearing a full teaching load. Regular faculty seminars that discuss new research can serve as a bridge between the two tracks.The urgency of this reform is hard to overstate. India has one of the youngest and fastest-growing populations in the world. The number of young people entering higher education is rising at a pace that no system relying exclusively on research-active faculty can sustainably meet. To expand access without destroying quality, we must be honest about what we are asking people to do and stop asking one person to be two things at once.The writer is an honorary senior fellow at Melbourne Law School