Excellent research is one thing, but for many academics, their time would be better spent doing what they do best – teaching, says Jonathan Wolff

When it was announced, a few months ago, that there would be a pay freeze for public sector workers, a somewhat sheepish question ran through common rooms. Are we public sector employees? I asked this myself several times, and received a number of confident, though contradictory, answers. It seems that we are not, officially, but in many ways it feels as if we are, not least in our dumb resignation to our presumed fates.

Still, we are not quite the quasi-public servants that we once were. As contract research, and, more importantly, student fees, become ever larger slices of income, universities rely less on public funding than they did. Indeed, we might now regard the universities as a living example of that oft-thought mythical beast: the successful public/private partnership.

But successful for how much longer? The cuts are not here yet, but they are on their way. There has already been an unseemly public squabble about which bits of the sector should be the first out of the balloon, but that seems to have died down, at least in public. When firm plans for cuts are announced, we'll see how well the truce holds.

Cuts in public services will be a huge setback for those already struggling, and possibly self-defeating in the longer term, when a future government has to mop up the damage. But the higher education sector looks like a softer target, for cuts to us won't victimise society's most disadvantaged (although they will hit the most vulnerable in the sector: those on temporary contracts or just coming on to the job market). Still, if they are handled badly, university cuts could be financially self-defeating almost right away.

Cuts mean cutting staff. It is already taken as given that as staff leave and retire, they will not all be replaced. This will lead to rising staff-student ratios, and, it is supposed, rising class sizes and deterioration in student experience.

This is problematic both educationally and financially. Recruitment of overseas students makes higher education, in effect, one of the UK's largest export industries, as well as bringing income to local economies. If cuts damage our reputation, they will affect our ability to recruit overseas students, potentially causing a greater loss of revenue than they save.

This will be shrugged aside, of course, as special pleading. By cutting "waste", there need be no loss of quality. We will be leaner, fitter, hungrier, and better able to compete in the world market, so goes the mantra. This rhetoric is puzzling, though. You don't increase a boxer's chances by cutting off his food supply, even if it does make him leaner.

Nevertheless, I would be the last to argue that there is no waste in the sector. But we need the government's help to deal with it. There is another way to square the circle without compromising teaching quality or the production of genuinely excellent research.

I've moaned before about the research assessment exercise, which was renamed the research excellence framework (REF) in order to mark the fact that it now … actually, I'll have to get back to you about that. But whatever the changes, current plans still create pressure for every academic to strive, in their research publications, to reach at least the lower foothills of international excellence, whether or not this is the best use of their time. Many mid-career academics would be much better employed updating their lecture notes, paying more attention to their students' work, and maybe even doing a bit more teaching, rather than beavering away on research that barely anyone will ever read. Not the right thing for everyone, everywhere, of course, but that's the whole point.

If the government had the courage, it should put an indefinite hold on the REF and undertake a review of university funding so that excellence in teaching is treated as comparable in importance to excellence in research. I doubt that I'll like what comes out the other end, but we have to do something new. New, but in this case not very radical. It is simply a matter of creating incentives for university staff to concentrate on where they can make their greatest contribution. From each according to their ability.

• Jonathan Wolff is professor of philosophy at University College London. His column appears monthly

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