Teaching culture is key to academic careers, new international survey finds
The Teaching Cultures Survey 2025 led by Dr. Ruth Graham includes responses from IT:U as Austria’s sole participating institution, alongside 16 other universities worldwide. The results point to a clear link between institutional priorities and academic career prospects. IT:U’s newest Future Report analyses the survey findings, highlighting their implications for the future of academic careers and the recognition of teaching in higher education.
Embedding teaching alongside research
The Teaching Cultures Survey 2025 gathered responses from 12,071 academics across 17 universities in nine countries. It finds that when teaching is a strategic priority, cultural change accelerates and academics report stronger career prospects linked to teaching. Leadership support is key to embedding teaching alongside research and increasing its legitimacy. The study also reveals a perception gap, with early-career researchers less confident than senior colleagues about how strongly teaching is valued in promotion and evaluation.
“The Teaching Cultures Survey shows that how universities recognise and reward teaching is a crucial factor for the quality of higher education. This has been our thinking at IT:U from early on. The survey’s findings, together with current research, now strengthen and inform the framework we are building to evaluate teaching. We see this as the beginning of a long-term commitment to fostering excellence across all dimensions of our academic mission, including both teaching and research.”
Christina Nyström, Founding Director Learning
Rethinking academic roles through integrated teaching and research at IT:U
As the only recently established university in the cohort, IT:U occupies a distinct position. Unlike long-established institutions, it is designing its academic culture without inherited structures or legacy constraints such as entrenched promotion pathways or deeply embedded evaluation norms. This allows institutional systems for recognition and reward to be built intentionally from the outset.
At IT:U, research and teaching are designed as closely integrated and equally valued activities rather than separate career tracks. Professors engage directly with students in project-based learning formats, while Lab Experts with professional and industry backgrounds contribute practical expertise to teaching. This model is intended to strengthen the connection between scientific inquiry and real-world application.
Five drivers of strong teaching cultures
The study identifies five common factors in universities with particularly strong teaching cultures:
- Visible academic leadership that explicitly prioritizes teaching
- Systematic inclusion of teaching in performance and development processes
- Clear, evidence-informed criteria for evaluating teaching quality
- Career-stage–specific development pathways and support structures
- Close integration between teaching-focused and research-focused academic roles
For IT:U, these findings provide practical guidance as it continues to develop its institutional framework. More broadly, the survey highlights a sector-wide challenge: limited confidence in how teaching quality is assessed and rewarded.
In response, IT:U aligns itself with international reform initiatives such as the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA) and the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA), both of which advocate moving beyond journal impact factors as primary indicators of research quality.
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About the Teaching Cultures Survey
The Teaching Cultures Survey (2025) is an international study led by Dr. Ruth Graham examining how universities recognize and reward teaching and how these practices shape institutional culture and academic careers. The 2025 edition includes 12,071 respondents from 17 universities across nine countries.