Read the full transcript of Professor Iain White’s talk titled “Why Isn’t Research Changing The World?” at TEDxUniversity of Waikato, August 22, 2025.
A Personal Confession About Academic Failure
PROFESSOR IAIN WHITE: I want to share a confession with you today. It’s something I haven’t really told many people before, and certainly not in a forum like this. But sometimes I think my career has been a failure. I came into academia to make a difference, to try just in a small way to generate knowledge that helps improve society. But recently I had that actually really depressing realisation that every field I’ve ever researched in my entire career has been deemed to be, one, in a permanent state of crisis, two, probably deteriorating, and three, I’m not sure this will change before I retire. So, yeah, that’s a pretty bleak start to a TED Talk, so sorry about that. But sometimes you do need to say the quiet doubts and failures out loud.
If you turn on any news channel and you’ll hear the word crisis. We’ve had a housing crisis, a climate crisis, a health crisis, a biodiversity crisis, an inequality crisis, an infrastructure crisis. I mean, even the news channels themselves are in crisis.
A Conversation About Documenting Decline
Then you speak to colleagues and you think, I’m not alone in having these doubts around this failure to generate impact. I’ve got a friend who’s a very successful academic at a different university, and we were having a coffee one morning. It was summer, it was mid-morning, we had this beautiful blue sky, and we’re on a bench outside this coffee shop. It was by the coast and there was a sea breeze. It was just one of those absolutely perfect days. We’re having a meeting to design our next research project, and the idea was we’d do something that could really make a difference.
This person said something to me that’s just been rolling around my head ever since.
They said, “You know Iain, I’d really like to do something transformative.” Then they took a sip of coffee and they said, “Sometimes I just feel I’ve spent my entire career documenting decline.” Documenting decline.
I know this sounds a bit depressing, but it wasn’t. Maybe it was just how lovely the day was, or just how relaxed we were, and being frank and open and vulnerable and sharing these stories, but it was actually energising. It was empowering. It became this really creative moment, because it raised all the new research questions we should be asking. Shouldn’t the crisis we research be temporary, not permanent? Isn’t that the entire definition of a crisis? If they are normalised, then perhaps there’s something about the ways science is structured, funded or organised that warrants as much attention as the problems themselves.
This is a talk around crises, knowledge, and how I think the universities might respond to address this.
The Success Paradox in Universities
The first thing to say is when we talk about ongoing crises, it suggests the universities’ systems fail, but it’s not. By every measure, in universities and science more generally, we have been stunningly successful. We have world-class researchers producing high-quality research at top-ranked universities. Peer-reviewed publications, which is the core of our activity, generate a level of productivity growth that far exceeds the economy more generally.
You may not know this, but the number of publications we produce globally has been increasing year-on-year by between 8% and 9%, sometimes more, sometimes less, for decades. That is a huge amount of knowledge being generated every single day, and it’s sustained year-on-year. At that rate, it’s almost a doubling every decade. You also see science in the press and frequent opinion pieces from academics.
So point one is that we have been incredibly successful at generating knowledge, and more knowledge should equal more evidence, should equal better informed politics, more effective policy, and better social outcomes. I mean, that’s the deal. That’s how it should work. We do operate like almost an R&D arm of society.
This is the key point I really want to emphasise. Research also emphasises that science has become less disruptive. What that means is that the science we generate is less likely to significantly change society. So we’ve become a little bit more incremental and a little less transformational.
Why Success and Failure Coexist
So how can we be highly productive in generating knowledge but failing to hit the crises that we’re researching? How can we have success and failure occurring at exactly the same time? I think there’s a few reasons why that’s happening.
I think first, perhaps it’s connected. We just don’t have time. We don’t have the time to read other people’s research and amplify the voices, because we’re so busy researching and writing and doing our own small piece of the puzzle.
The second one, it could be the sheer volume. I mean, you ask any scientist and they’ll tell you how hard it is to keep track of new publications and new journals in their field. It’s a bit like going from the old days of just a handful of TV channels and everyone sort of knew what was on. So now someone’s saying, have you seen House of the Dragon or Neon and your House of the what-on-what? I don’t know. There’s so much content these days you just can’t keep on top of it. It’s the same with science. Time poor researchers end up reading and citing the same research by the bigger, more well-known names, while more peripheral, radical or emergent voices struggle for attention.
Third, it could be the way that science is organised and structured, which means or incentivises, means we could be accused of over-documenting and under-doing. So academics like to work within their field in small groups and stick to their disciplinary area, but maybe this means that the extra knowledge we’re generating is just smaller bits of the same size pie. We’re just creating even more fragmentation.
Solutions: What We Can Do
So if we do have this situation of having success and failure at the same time, what can we do? I think there’s a few reasons that we can address.
I think, first of all, there is a need for sector reform, but the first thing we can do is talk more openly about failure. I think universities love talking about success. We all do it. Has anyone been on LinkedIn today? Success is everywhere. It’s congested. It’s mainstream, but it also suggests that things are going well. We are being effective and it’s almost like a continuation. It means that we’re not looking at the difficult questions that failure can raise, but failure is much more creative and disruptive. It’s a point of reflection. It induces a pause of solidarity. Importantly, it’s a prerequisite if you want to learn from it.
So acknowledging failure just breaks the treadmill of activity around it, induces a pause where we can ask questions of accountability. Why have we failed? What have we learned? What can we do differently? How can we reorganise and go again?
Fostering Cognitive Diversity
The second thing universities can do is foster cognitive diversity, so to tap into the breadth of knowledge and expertise that is housed within a university, so we see the same problem in different ways. I’ve often thought that disciplinary boundaries are part of the problem. Many disciplines are hundreds or even thousands of years old and we have this deep knowledge, but maybe the reasons why crises persist is that they sit outside of any single discipline. If they didn’t, maybe they’d be solved by now. So crises demand collaboration. The best diverse minds from within and beyond the university working together focus on solutions as well as new disciplinary knowledge.
I think there’s this Goldilocks zone of science collaboration we need to inhabit to tap into this cognitive diversity. Too narrow expertise in fields and we see the same problem in similar ways. It’s too diverse and we don’t have the common ground to connect to each other.
The University as the Perfect Collaboration Space
This is where our third point comes in, which is I think the universities and governments need to do more to foster collaboration within the university and beyond. Otherwise we only see small bits of what is a big complex problem.
If you think about it, the university is actually perfectly designed for this. Within the space of a few buildings we’ve got engineers, scientists, lawyers, indigenous researchers, economists, psychologists. We’ve got senior academics, young career researchers, graduate students. We’ve got people from this city who understand this place and this land. We’ve got people who are coming from all over the world with their own knowledge and expertise. This is how the university is structured. It’s how every university is structured. It’s actually strange we don’t collaborate more when you think about it. There’s nothing else in society that’s quite like a university and yet it’s not our natural habitat.
Science as Usual
I want to end by saying academics frequently talk about the need for others to change. We use words like “business as usual” or even “politics as usual” to draw attention to the problems of the state as growing the need for transformation. How often do we talk about “science as usual”? Our existing ways of knowing and doing that are sometimes centuries old.
The first step in moving away from science as usual is acknowledging failure and addressing the fact that we do have these persistent crises. We do have success and failure occurring at exactly the same time. Acknowledging failure is important because not only does it give us lessons but it gives us that pause and reflect to think about how we can look at our resources and reorganise in response.
The stories about failure are really, really powerful. They show what’s at stake and for whom if we don’t do this. Don’t just take it from me, take it from Hollywood. For those of you who can’t see what’s on this T-shirt, it says “At the start of every disaster movie there’s a scientist being ignored.”
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