Excerpt: The acceptance of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) by the academic community has made considerable progress over the past few years, but it is still everywhere a minority interest in a climate that puts disciplinary research above all other academic activities. Furthermore, this situation is strengthened everywhere by features of marketisation which have increased the importance of management and finance in academia, to the detriment of the really important work of academics with which SoTL is concerned – teaching and research. In England – more than in Scotland, and it is important to appreciate that as an outcome of devolution, the two countries are increasingly diverging in their academic concerns – SoTL has had to cope with, on the one hand, management styles which have devalued academics from colleagues to employees, and on the other with the disastrous effects of the Research Selectivity Exercise (RAE), a primarily self-inflicted ‘own goal’ of academia, which has biased research towards short-termism, and has introduced terms such as ‘research inactive’ to label academic staff who, while engaged in both research and teaching could not satisfy the narrow research definitions of the RAE and came as a result to be labelled ‘research inactive’.