Lost in the 'nexus'

First of all, I know that upon seeing the word 'nexus' (as in 'research-teaching nexus'), lots of people reach for the remote control (or their revolver - choose your metaphor according to the extent of your antipathy).

I think this is because it's jargon, and (at least in this instance) it's jargon associated with Higher Education policy, rather than with any particular discipline within higher education.

Now, discipline-specific jargon tends to annoy everybody outside its home-discipline, but it's no big deal because most academics are rarely forced to decipher jargon from from other peoples' disciplines because, well, it's somebody else's discipline, and if you really wanted to know what they were talking about, you would've got your degree in their field rather than yours.

But phrases like 'research-teaching nexus' concern EVERYONE in higher education, though not many people are conversant in HE jargon. Hence, it's both baffling and relevant - which is a combination that's guaranteed to raise hackles. Most people's immediate response to this sort of language is 'seeing as you're talking about what I do for a living, surely it's YOUR problem if I don't understand what you're talking about, not mine.'

Another way of putting it is that Higher Education research treats academics as practitioners rather than 'experts' (in the academic sense). And as a result, many people within academia respond to HE research the way that practitioners around the world respond to academics: with impatience and suspicion.