Emerging researchers/silent majority study findings

The 2017 study on emerging researchers and the silent majority (the large number of early career academics at lecturer and senior lecturer level who are not pursuing research) revealed that nearly 70% of the lecturers and senior lecturers at public universities did not hold PhDs and less than half were actively publishing. Following a discussion of these findings, the Board deduced that the report findings were implying that public universities had no pool of successors to the current researchers. It was agreed that this warranted further discussion once the Department of Science and Technology released the full report. Some of the issues emerging from the study would be tackled as part of the detailed scenario planning discussed earlier.