The call to action for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) with respect to Sustainable Development is on multiple dimensions: do relevant research on sustainability, educate current generations of students on sustainability issues and engage actively with society. But these dimensions, when combined, can both complement and conflict with each other. In this paper, we focus on one side of the triangle, i.e., the nexus between research and teaching. Literature suggests these activities are partly complementary but can become antagonistic, competing for limited time and resources of academic staff. Thus, this contribution aims at exploring an open issue that is still under-analyzed: what happens to research and teaching of university staff when they are under a new pressure, originated by a global, urgent, challenging recognition of the need to address new problems? How do universities react?

To address this issue, an exploratory study was undertaken, collaborating with a large research-oriented and general-purpose university that made it accessible survey-data on academic staff. A database was constructed providing information on sustainability-related research and teaching activities of scholars from the University at an individual level. Research data were extracted from the Scopus database, identifying all scientific publications with at least one author affiliated with the University and addressing at least one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), from 1990 onward. Teaching data were instead directly sourced from the University’s information system, which reports information on teaching courses taught in the last ten years, including any SDG-related topics addressed in course programs.

Explorative analyses were then conducted to understand the dynamics of introduction of sustainability topics in research and teaching activities by academics, thus providing an overview of the reaction of an academic community to the emergence of these new relevant issues.
Our findings suggest that there is a high heterogeneity in the reaction of the academic staff, without a clear and significant relationship between commitment to teaching and research at individual level.

We were able to identify three main segments:
(1) Inactive members who are not engaged on sustainable issues either in research or in teaching,
(2) Partially active members, including active teachers, but silent in research on sustainability and vice-versa, and
(3) Highly committed members, active in both sustainable research and teaching.

Interestingly, the largest segment is the one with partial commitment, suggesting a gradual approach to sustainability themes by the academic staff. Furthermore, regarding the diffusion of the new sustainability topics, teaching seems to be more rapid than research in gaining engagement from a large share of the academic staff, and the latter follows a slow dynamic that surprisingly reminds the adoption of innovations in industrial sectors. These preliminary results can be useful to shed some light on an understudied phenomenon and to drive future research in a promising direction.

Keywords: Higher Education, Research, Teaching, Research/teaching nexus, Sustainability, Sustainable Development, Exploration.