The combination of research and teaching is often described as the principle distinguishing the university from other institutions that either do research or offer education. Recent calls for research-based teaching point to this principle as based in the ideals of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s visions of higher education as treating science as a problem that has still not been fully resolved. While combining research and teaching was never straightforward in practice, a particular problem emerges around this principle in today’s mass university, which is increasingly organized around governing performance through explicit – and thus definite – measures.
This paper discusses the dilemmas of assessment in courses aiming to integrate research in teaching in a Danish university. Drawing on ethnographic studies of courses in a university-wide initiative to promote the integration of research and teaching, the paper considers why both teachers and students relate to exams as somehow at odds with a research process. The paper introduces French sociologist Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology to conceptualize this in terms of the differing ways an individual engages and invest in different situations, or what Thévenot calls the plural regimes of engagement. The paper argues that re-thinking research-based teaching in universities of today calls for a consideration of the dissimilar regimes of engagement – and the different benefits and sacrifices they involve for individuals in practice.