Examination of Witnesses (Questions 641-659)
MONDAY 17 MARCH 2003
SIR RICHARD
SYKES AND
PROFESSOR RICK
TRAINOR
Chairman
641. Can I welcome Sir Richard Sykes and Professor
Rick Trainor. I suppose we are going to get allegations of metropolitan
tendencies, having the two of you here today, but you are welcome,
indeed, because you represent very different institutions in our
capital city, and we are hoping to learn a great deal from you.
We wanted to see you particularly, Sir Richard, and Professor
Trainor, because we thought that Sir Richard, coming from his
industrial and commercial background, and Professor Rick Trainor,
from a very different background, albeit American in origin, might
have some interesting perspectives on what the Committee would
like to hear. And can I say to you that we have not invited you
here as members of any group, so it is your individual opinions,
as heads of your institutions, that we are interested in, not
any group that you might be associated with. Is that all right,
because we have had those views?
(Professor Trainor) Yes.
(Sir Richard Sykes) Yes.
642. Thank you very much. Can I start off by
asking you, do you want to say a couple of words, to get us moving?
Sir Richard, would you like to say anything, to begin?
(Sir Richard Sykes) Yes, just quickly. The research
section of the White Paper, from my perspective and my college's
perspective, I would be in broad agreement with the sentiments
of that article. We believe that if you are going to have a certain
budget for supporting excellent research then we can only afford
to have in this country a few, internationally-competitive, research-based
universities. It is just such an expensive operation to run today,
if you want to do this job properly and fund research, in the
sense that you have got institutions with strong research capability,
across a large number of disciplines, that really can attack major,
global problems, then they need the infrastructure, they need
to be able to attract the best staff and the best students, and
they need to have the ability to compete with the best in the
world. If you want those sorts of institutions in this country
then you cannot afford more than a handful.
643. Right. Professor Trainor, do you want to
say something, to start us off?
(Professor Trainor) Yes, thank you, Chairman. Sir
Richard and I both represent universities from London, but I think
probably we will provide you with at least a bit of diversity
of view here, because I think my university is broadly uncomfortable
with what the White Paper says about research. And I think it
comes back to the concept which Richard Lambert mentioned, about
diversity of mission, because I think that what has been misunderstood,
in much of the debate about this issue, is that there is already
very considerable differentiation of mission among UK universities.
They approach the three basic tasks of universities—teaching,
research and outside partnerships—to very different degrees
and in very different ways. So, while I would support the concept
of diversity of mission, I think what is at risk at the moment
is the coming into being of what I might call discontinuity of
mission, in the attempt by the White Paper to steer institutions
into what appear to be fairly discrete categories, like "world-class
research institutions", on the one hand, or "knowledge
transfer and teaching institutions", on the other, or "teaching-only
institutions", on the other. And I think I do disagree with
Sir Richard, not about the need for leading institutions, because
I am sure they play an important role in contributing to UK plc,
but rather in the extent to which the research that goes on in
other kinds of institutions is cost-effective for the country,
which I believe broadly it is. And I think that some of the changes
which I think, Chairman, you have already alluded to in this afternoon's
session, about research—which actually have gone quite a
long way even since the White Paper has been launched—are
risking quite a lot of valuable research which actually is absorbing
quite a small proportion of the country's research bill. I think
of some research in my own institution that recently won a Queen's
Anniversary prize, and has only just escaped having its RAE funding
withdrawn, because the "4" funding was rescued from
oblivion at the last moment. And I do not want to go on at length,
but I think a case can be made not just for the scientific value
of this research but also for the contribution it makes to undergraduates,
to post-graduates, and also to the retention of high-quality staff,
and not least to knowledge transfer. Also I think my university
is unhappy with the proposition that there is not a link between
research activity and reputation, on the one hand, and the ability
to deliver knowledge transfer, on the other. So we are quite happy
with the White Paper's suggestion that universities clarify their
strategic objectives; what we are uncomfortable with is the notion
that a university like my own—even more so, perhaps, some
other university that is in the system—should contract their
mission by withdrawing from a whole category of university activity.
644. Thank you for that. Sir Richard, when you
said "a handful" you meant a handful, you meant four
or five?
(Sir Richard Sykes) Yes.
645. What are the implications of that for all
those who would not be in that four or five?
(Sir Richard Sykes) They are not in it today, of course.
It is purely a recognition of what is happening, this has been
happening for a long time, so if you look at SRIF funding, if
you look at research funding generally from the Research Councils,
if you look at research funding from the charities, it goes to
a small number of institutions; there is a tail, of course, but
most of it has been concentrated for a long time. We are seeing
now in the White Paper, "We have only a certain pot of money,
we can't dilute it any more than we've been diluting it, we're
putting more money into the system, therefore should we concentrate
it at the top end, for the benefit of the economy, in the long
term, and should we then drive other institutions to be fit for
purpose?" That is, whatever they are doing, they need to
be quality, they need to have good performance standards and they
need to be supported for what they do. So I do not think that
this impacts on Greenwich, Greenwich can decide what its strategy
is; if it wants to get involved with businesses, if it wants to
get involved in research that is important to those businesses,
I do not see any barrier to impeding that. But if Greenwich, or
any other university, is not at the level of six stars, or five-star,
or an internationally-competitive research level, then it will
not get the level of funding that one of your top universities
is going to receive. So I think that is all we are seeing, this
gradual change to what has been happening for a long time in this
country.
646. You are right in that, Sir Richard, but
at the moment the figures are that about 75% of research funding
out of HEFCE goes to 25 institutions, and 84% of the Research
Councils goes to those 25 institutions. That is very different
from the concentration in a handful, and there are a lot of institutions
out there that have very fine departments, of five-star and four,
and think themselves pretty good. And, in a sense, your view of
an even greater concentration worries a large number of people
who think that is too much, because you would do two things, you
would strip away the resources that flow to the 20%, rather than
the five, and also you would send a direct psychological message
to anyone researching in those other institutions that they were
in a lesser league and had got no hope of getting into the higher
league?
(Sir Richard Sykes) Definitely they are in a lesser
league; we have no difficulty with that in any other walk of life
so why should we have a problem with it in the universities. We
know there are different leagues, and why do we not accept that
and deal with it appropriately. And, my point is, we have to decide
what we want as a nation, there is only so much money; as you
keep saying, it is public money, a lot of it has been spent on
these universities. If we want to have, in a competitive world
that is being driven today basically by science and technology,
half a dozen top universities in this country, that can compete
because they have excellence, not just in a few groups but across
the whole panoply of scientific excellence, so you have got the
critical mass that helps these people work together to address
some of the world's biggest problems, then we can afford only
a few of them. That does not mean to say that other institutions
are not going to get funded, there is no question about that,
and I think we have got to set up different models, and the White
Paper makes reference to that. And again coming back to the RDAs,
I think the RDAs have an important role with their universities,
but not when we come to some of these half a dozen that we are
talking about that really are working on a global stage, and I
think we have to recognise that diversity. I am all for diversity
of mission and I am all for making sure we support that diversity
of mission, but we cannot all be Imperials and Oxfords and Cambridges,
it is not possible, we just do not have the money.
647. Professor Trainor, would you agree with
all that?
(Professor Trainor) Not entirely, Chairman! As I said
in my opening statement, I support the idea that every country,
not least the UK, needs leading universities. I think what is
at issue here is the share of the cake that they require in order
to be leading, and the extent to which their leading position
is sustained, in fact, by interrelationships with a whole range
of other universities who also are engaged in useful research,
as well as useful activities of different kinds. Sir Richard's
case for half a dozen research universities is a very striking
one, because that means that in England roughly 84 universities
would be losers from the White Paper in this respect, and six
gainers, which is pretty stark. And I suggest probably you will
have quite a queue of people wanting to come in here to put the
opposite case. Looked at from the position of a university like
mine, you are talking about attempting to preserve a relatively
small amount of the existing research cake, or, for that matter,
the cake more generally. The most recent figures, before the changes
in research funding over the last two years, suggest that the
post-92 universities were getting less than 10% of the money that
was distributed according to the Research Assessment Exercise.
But, those sectional points aside, it seems to me that the more
general point here is one of potential ossification of the system.
The White Paper says that we need to allow for promising departments
and emerging fields of research; my fear, leaving aside the special
interests of my own university, is that a ruthlessly selective
system of funding research and the focusing of resources on this
very small number of universities, those steps are going to block
off that potential movement up of universities and of individual
departments within them, and I cannot see that that is really
in the long-term interests of the country.
Chairman: Thank you for that.
Jonathan Shaw
648. Sir Richard, I was provided with a list
which was quite interesting, and it says, "What have the
following got in common?" It is, the first rate-adaptive
heart pacemaker, total hip replacement, portable defibrillator,
the contraceptive pill, the relationship between babies' sleeping
positions and sudden infant deaths, liquid-crystal displays, motorway
sign systems, and many other important things, that were either
invented or discovered at universities that are outside what we
call the "golden triangle", at universities that had
a level four or below. Do you not think that, just by concentrating,
we are not going to be in a position to be inventing or discovering
the many important things that I have listed, and further ones
in the future?
(Sir Richard Sykes) I would disagree totally with
that. I do not understand what is changing here. If the people
at the University of Hull want to work on liquid-crystal displays,
what is going to stop them working on it; they have got local
businesses, have they not, they can apply for grants to Research
Councils, they can apply for grants to charities. If you have
got people with smart ideas, creative and innovative, people will
support them; that is not what we are talking about, this train
of belief that everybody is going to be divorced from any research
funding, which is absolutely untrue. The situation today is that
most of the research funding goes to a small number of universities,
and most of it is five, five-star; now, because of grade inflation,
we have moved to six-star. So we are talking about five, five-star,
six-star. But if you were talking about funding universities in
an RAE situation, where we have set up an elaborate structure
to determine the research excellence in these universities, and
we say we cut off funding at a level three-A, or a level four,
those are the rules of the game; and if you want to get up there
then you have got to make sure that you get in those people and
you start doing that work, and there is no reason why you cannot
become a level five, or a five-star, or a six-star.
649. But it is a process, is it not; in order
for universities to get to a five-star they have to assemble a
team in the first place, and in order to assemble a team there
has to be an attractiveness for people to want to go and work
in those particular institutions? And if they are not in the frame,
if they have not got anything, it is going to be very difficult
for them even to get started, is it not?
(Sir Richard Sykes) We started running the RAE in
1986, so everybody has had plenty of time to do that, and plenty
of time to decide what their mission is, what their long-term
strategy is, what they are going to be using the funding for;
and we end up in a situation today where there is a very high
concentration of funding, based on what, based on a peer review
system that views pure excellence in research. It is not as though
we are just inventing this today, it has been running for a long
time.
650. And there is a review of it at present,
is there not?
(Sir Richard Sykes) Yes.
651. What are you saying about the Government
removing some of the level four funding, without that review system
being complete?
(Sir Richard Sykes) I think, what they have done for
the next year, that will be 2003-04, is move some of the level
four funding to contribute to the new six-star, fours will still
get funded, fives will be funded as they were in 2001-02, and
so will the five-stars. Obviously, there are some safety nets
being put in place, so that those departments are not going to
suffer dramatically next year, but, of course, as you go on to
2004-05, 2005 and 2006, if that stays in place then they will,
but, of course, that gives time for the university then to decide
what their mission really is. And if there are people in those
areas that are five-star then either they can form the nucleus
of the new activity that will bring in better people, or there
are schemes in the White Paper, as you know, to encourage those
people perhaps to move to other universities for a period before
they return.
652. Research, once it is headed up by people
who might transfer to other universities, obviously, you have
research teams, built up over many years, and those people in
that team need to feel a certain level of security for their own
careers, and if they are level four and money is being taken away,
and that will affect them, are they going to hang about; and what
is going to happen to that piece of emerging research that they
might have been working on for 10 years? Do you not think, Sir
Richard, that, given that we have already the most concentrated
research funding in the world, and America is going in the opposite
direction, albeit in percentage terms, not huge, but 1% of American
research R&D funding would be very well received by most universities,
so if America is spreading it a bit wider and we have got the
most concentrated, is there a level at which you say, "Well,
what is going to happen to the rest, other institutions up and
down the country?" Because I understand Imperial graduates
go to Greenwich to study for their PhDs; what is going to happen
to them?
(Sir Richard Sykes) First of all, let us get rid of
the misconception of the university research funding in the US,
which is more diluted, of course it is, because most universities,
even the public universities, have got significant endowments
that allow them to fund research, in the way that we do not; so
that is why you see a different picture in the US than you see
in the UK. If you look at apples for apples then basically it
is the same. We come back to the issue of where we wish to spend
our money most effectively. If we wish to dilute it over the system,
and let every flower bloom, then we have only a certain pot of
money, we can do that, but, rest assured, we will soon lose international
competitiveness in our top universities. The world is becoming
a different place, the economy is based on knowledge, and if we
do not have these top, internationally-competitive universities
then our educational system will go, like the European system
has gone, downhill. And we talked about Europe earlier, in fact,
it is very difficult to name one internationally-competitive university
in Europe, with the exception of ETH, in Zurich. Why; because
of the same issues. The funding has been diluted, so basically
they are all the same. We used to have some very fine, internationally-competitive
universities in Europe; not any more. Most of them now are in
the United States or in this country, and we will lose those.
Chairman
653. Professor Trainor, do you agree with that?
(Professor Trainor) Well, Chairman, Sir Richard has
covered quite a large range of issues there. I think I disagree
with him on the implications of the evolution of the Research
Assessment Exercise. From the point of view of a university like
mine, which was not eligible for the Research Assessment Exercise
until 1992, and was starting with a base of no discrete research
funding at that stage, the idea that this is a mature system is
not very convincing. I think also it needs to be borne in mind
that the results of the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise are
now being used for purposes for which they were not intended,
or certainly which were not publicised. So that, shortly before
the submission of the returns to the Research Assessment Exercise,
the Higher Education Funding Council for England Board made a
public decision that "3s" would receive some funding;
well, in a literal sense, that has occurred, but, of course, they
have received a great deal less funding than they did previously,
and with the exception of now seven subjects are not receiving
any at all. Obviously, excellence is a very important thing to
pursue, I agree very much with Sir Richard about that, but I think
we need to take into account that, in contrast to the way in which
research projects are evaluated by the Research Councils, which
is sort of an individual bit of research receiving a valuation
against an absolute standard, the Research Assessment Exercise
is a very complex business, with very nuanced definitions of grades.
And I think one of the most alarming aspects of the significant
shift of funding against the fours, and the virtual obliteration
of the threes, is that national and international excellence figures
significantly in the definitions of the fours, and to some extent
of the threes as well. Sir Richard says that nothing will stop
ourselves—or he mentioned the University of Hull, I cannot
speak for them, of course—pursuing research. But I think
if there is a significant shift of capability funding—which
is what the Research Assessment Exercise is about—against
institutions and away from talented teams, it is bound to be harmful,
not just to what they are doing at the moment but also for the
ability of those teams and those institutions to attract support
from other sources. So I think we have a real risk here of a kind
of downward spiral, for what, according to the White Paper, looks
like being a large majority of English universities. And I think
the need for extreme concentration to meet international competitive
pressures has not been demonstrated conclusively; as Sir Richard
says, there are arguments in favour of it, also there are arguments
against it.
Jonathan Shaw
654. I just wonder what are the implications
for the young, working-class person who has gone to university
for the first time to be able to be inspired and captivated by
research, if he is not in an institution that is carrying out
research; what is the likelihood of that young person becoming
familiar and excited, if it is concentrated in so few institutions?
I take your point, Sir Richard, but I guess it is how far you
concentrate such a great deal of funding, and if we emerge with
only half a dozen or so where are all these people, who are in
our institutions going to go; there will not be room in just half
a dozen or so, there will be a knowledge transfer, will there
not, abroad?
(Sir Richard Sykes) I would say to you that if you
look at people applying to do science, and we will stick to science
and engineering for the moment, in this country, it goes down
10% a year, and has done for the last 10 years; so, in fact, there
are not that many people who have the actual background and desire
to study science and engineering, so we are scraping the bottom
of the barrel. And if you look at most universities in the UK
today and their intake into science and technology, a lot of their
students, and more and more, are coming from overseas, because
they are the ones who want to do science and technology. So if
we are to create environments that really do attract the best,
from anywhere, and are prepared to give them an education which
is very different, and this is selecting people at the highest
level, I agree with you, those people being in contact with some
of the finest researchers in the world, on the cutting-edge of
their subject, is going to be very inspirational to those students.
But we cannot fill British universities with those people, they
are not everywhere, they are very difficult to get hold of, America
is competing for them, China now will be competing for them, Singapore
is competing for them, we are competing for them. So that is what
we are trying to say; if we want to attract the best people, the
lecturers, the professors, the scientists, the engineers, and
then the students follow, then we have to set up centres of excellence.
A student going to Greenwich goes there for the learning experience,
and that is critically important, and the learning experience
is increasingly important everywhere; but, of course, what you
must have are people who can inspire those young people to do
the job. Let us say you were going to do a course on brick-laying;
you need somebody that understands brick-laying, you need somebody
that understands the technology and has the expertise and the
background. So we must make sure that, even though we have got
diversity of mission, the people who are actually teaching, they
do not have to be brilliant researchers, they just need to have
a knowledge of their subject and be able to convey that information
to the people that they are teaching; because learning is just
as important as teaching.
655. I met a person today who was an HND student
at one of the Kent universities, and they are the first generation
into university, did an HND, and through the contact with research
at that particular university is now a professor and making a
huge contribution. Now if that were not there, if he had not been
exposed to that research, at that particular university, outside
of the triangle, then we would not be growing our own, which is
vital as well, because we cannot import everything. This is one
of the criticisms perhaps of the Premier League, is it not, and
the consequences of the other divisions; there is not room for
it to be able to grow our own, if we just draw in from abroad
all the time? What are the long-term consequences for that?
(Sir Richard Sykes) I think they are dire, but, the
problem is, the students in the UK are not applying to do science
and engineering.
656. What about Professor Trainor?
(Professor Trainor) I think this is a very important
topic; though I may say that perhaps one of the difficulties with
the White Paper is that, important as science and engineering
are, what it says about subjects is almost entirely about science
and engineering. So, for example, it presents a bit of evidence
about the importance of concentration in science and engineering
research; when it comes to the rest of knowledge, it merely asserts
that it is important But that is by the by. On this issue of learning,
and the kind of people that we want to assist learning in our
universities, as Sir Richard says there is a problem of qualified
people coming forward to do science and engineering. Nonetheless,
if you apply a bit of flexibility to their credentials you can
find quite a lot of promising people and get them through to creditable
degrees in science and engineering. We have a significant number
of our undergraduates, a very sizeable minority, in those fields.
And the question of whether having researchers in a department,
or a university, assists the learning of students is really a
very important one. And here I find the White Paper very unconvincing.
There is an interesting article in The Times Higher the week before
last, which criticises one article, which updates one article
which is footnoted in the White Paper disputing the value of research
informing teaching, and indicates that the data in question was
about 25 years old. The Higher also quotes one of the original
co-authors as saying that he had been advocating more of a connection
between research and teaching rather than arguing against it.
And as Professor Bassey from the British Educational Research
Association was quoted as saying, in the same article,[1]
it is one thing to say that you do not need every university teacher
to be a leading researcher, it is quite another to suggest, as
in effect the White Paper is doing, that students will not suffer
if you have no active researchers in a whole school, or in a whole
university. Given that business, and employers generally, now
rightly expect universities to produce graduates with transferable
skills, including the ability to think independently, to carry
out projects and individual investigations, and that universities,
including mine, have put that very much into their curriculum,
in terms of third year dissertations, and the like, if the White
Paper were to be implemented totally, we are facing the rather
odd situation that our undergraduates might be carrying out research
but the people teaching them would not. I think that the White
Paper goes out on a limb in disputing the connection between research
and teaching. It seems to me that the large number of people in
our university from socially-disadvantaged backgrounds deserve
the inspiration of teachers who have been involved in active investigation,
as much as the students in other universities do.
Chairman: I think we ought to move on,
and we can come back to that later.
Valerie Davey
657. Sir Richard, you emphasised the value which
you gave to diversity; nevertheless, did you welcome the underpinning
core funding which the Government is giving, through the White
Paper, of the 6%, which will come through?
(Sir Richard Sykes) Yes. I think this is very important,
the recognition that the Government have that we have now to start
to fund the universities in this country much better than we have
in the past.
658. And at that level, was that the level you
anticipated?
(Sir Richard Sykes) I think it is a very generous
level. I think we have got a lot of catching-up to do, but, when
you consider everything else that requires funding in this country,
I think it is a very generous level of funding.
659. And do you think that is going to reach
both students and staff, or how will it be used, do you think?
(Sir Richard Sykes) I think it reaches all areas.
I think, one, we have got to make sure that we start paying academic
staff much more sensibly than we have in the past, that is a travesty,
and we all know the statistics there, for academic staff; so that
certainly has to be taken care of. The White Paper then recognises,
through the Roberts review, of course, that we have got to start
encouraging young people not just to be undergraduates but to
carry on and do research afterwards, otherwise we are going to
have no real seed-corn in our universities for the future. And
there are not too many incentives for young people to have some
debt and then carry on doing work in the university to get a post
graduate degree, with even greater debt, so they need to be earning
significant amounts of money. And I think we have made a start
now in the recognition that these stipends have to be much bigger
than they have been in the past; and somehow we have got to encourage
these young people to earn more money within the university sector
so there is an encouragement, and at least we have got some parity
with the outside world, that it is a choice, either you can stay
in the university, and earn basically the same sort of money that
you can in a reasonable job in the outside world.
1 Note by witness: In the Higher of 7 March
2003. Back
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