| Abstract: | The papers by Clive Forster and Andrew Beer achieve their intended purpose in identifying and, for the purposes of debate, contrasting two competing visions of the bases and ideals of university research. On the one hand, ‘basic’ research is portrayed as the province of the autonomous and self-motivated scholar, driven by curiosity and answerable only to disciplinary norms and peer evaluation, whose efforts expand knowledge for its own sake. On the other hand, there is the contracted researcher, who might happen to be employed in a university but whose research, based as it is upon whatever funding opportunities happen to present themselves, is oriented toward immediate applied relevance. |
