Examination of Witnesses (Questions 380
- 400)
WEDNESDAY 2 MARCH 2005
PROFESSOR RICHARD
BRUCKDORFER AND
MR MALCOLM
KEIGHT
Q380 Dr Turner: There would also
be no research in those areas.
Mr Keight: Indeed and certainly
the policy which the DfES in particular has been pursuing for
20 years now that somehow there is a way of separating the funding
between teaching and research means that early examples of the
practice in institutions is to either give people emphasis on
research or give it up altogether because the funding is not there.
So, to try and separate the two means that the system becomes
unviable.
Q381 Dr Turner: Do you have a different
view from within the golden triangle?
Professor Bruckdorfer: As somebody
brought up in the north of England and having studied at the University
of Liverpool, I certainly have my prejudices to maintain the presence
of all of these activities in the north of England and other parts
of the UK. I am a prime example: I was brought up on a council
housing estate and my natural inclination was to go to my local
university which happened to be, in this case, Liverpool. Maybe
things have changed, people become a little more global than they
used to be in what their choices are, but I think that first of
all, if there were no research in these universities, that would
be quite catastrophic. The central part of our activities—and
certainly I am very much engaged in training third year biochemists
as well as medical students who are doing intercalated BScs, is
the research project. You have to have people there on the ground
to be able to sustain them. We have a serious financial problem
every year because the staff ask, "Where is the money to
actually run these projects?" We give them about £300
for each project to actually sustain the project and probably
most of that actually comes out of their other research funds.
Teaching is being supported, as was said earlier, by that research
and I do not see how projects of that nature and actual practical
training can be done in a university which has no research activity.
That is why the traditional department had a mixture of people,
most of whom were both active in research and teaching, a minority
were the FRSs etc who were just doing research and occasionally
popped in and gave a lecture, and there were a few who administered
the teaching and did quite a bit of the teaching themselves. So,
we had a mixture of university staff and that was a mixed and
happy department. Now, as the students will tell you, most of
the staff are anxious about their research output and that is
done to the detriment of the teaching and students actually complain
that they are not getting the benefit of those staff.
Q382 Dr Turner: What is your view
on what is causing this concentration? Is the effect of RAE, for
instance, having an adverse effect increasing the concentration
and killing off four departments which get nothing or practically
nothing, nobody else gets anything and even five departments have
lost value in the last redistribution and only five-star departments
getting anywhere near the proper HEFCE funding? Can you see any
ways forward that can reduce this concentration because you both
seem to be agreed that it is unhealthy?
Professor Bruckdorfer: It is and,
as was indicated before, it is likely to be solved by putting
more money into it. I think nobody is against having periodic
assessments of the performance of departments, but one of my colleagues
mentioned to me that we go through this schizophrenic cycle where
one minute we are all researchers to impress the RAE and the next
minute the TQA comes along out in another cycle and suddenly we
are all teachers. It seems that one way of getting around that
is to actually have a system of assessment that looks at the total
activities of the department and the requirements of that department
in order to deliver them, maybe on the six year cycle that I believe
your Committee was thinking about earlier, but undoubtedly setting
people against each other because everybody is looking out for
their own position. It is not a healthy atmosphere within university
departments at the moment and we really have to get away from
that. To an extent, going back to the previous question, that
the profession is looking unattractive.
Q383 Mr Key: Should we support low-rated
regional south provision just to ensure that it is available to
local students?
Professor Bruckdorfer: First of
all, when you say "low", I do not think that four is
low. Four is actually a very reasonable sort of figure for a department
to actually have and shows probably mixtures of strengths within
that department. Not everybody is research active. Some may be
internationally active and some of them may be just of national
reputation. It does give an incentive for a department to actually
improve itself. If you only have all fives, what happens if those
fives actually become less impressive and become four later, who
are you going to replace them with because there is no other four
that can come up and improve itself because it will have already
been smashed as a research department? That is my concern. You
are going to reduce the base of science in the UK totally and
I am thinking that, for the future, where are all the great centres
of science going to go? I suspect it is going to go to China and
India in the future and not to the UK. If you look at United States
and at Britain, very many research departments are sustained by
people coming in to become post-docs from India and China and
taking some of those techniques back home again because many of
our youngsters do not actually want to have the rigour of being
a post-doc and wondering about where the next grant is coming
from. I think that we really do have to think very hard. Do we
want to maintain Britain as a centre of excellence? I do not think
it is done by just cutting off all the roots and just maintaining
the flower in the middle.
Q384 Mr Key: You said in your evidence
that there is—and I quote—"very little sign of
any strategic thinking about regional provision." Is there
a direct linkage between centres of strong research and better
regional economic growth?
Mr Keight: I have to say that
there is very little evidence. The regional development authorities
are, I think, just beginning to identify the significance of higher
education institutions to the economic development of their regions.
The evidence on the ground is very slim. In terms of general observation,
one can obviously see, if one looks at Manchester and the Liverpool
area, clearly Manchester University is central to the economy
of the North West. If you talk about East Anglia which is not
particularly well provided; it has Cambridge sitting in the middle
of it and there is an area of technological development around
Cambridge but, for the rest of East Anglia, it is extremely poorly
served and I think the economy probably bears that out. I think
that the regional development authorities really need to wake
up to just what it does mean to have the potential of a successful
series of higher education institutions within their regions.
Q385 Chairman: What do you think
the effect of the variable top-up fees is going to be? I know
that it is guesswork at the moment.
Professor Bruckdorfer: Malcolm
Grant, who is our Provost, told us that the net increase in our
income at UCL resulting from top-up fees would be 2% in terms
of the effect it is going to have on our whole . . .
Q386 Chairman: What about the entry
of students, Richard? Will that make them live at home, for example?
Professor Bruckdorfer: I think
it would force a number of them to live at home and again it is
going to be discriminatory against those who have lesser incomes.
Q387 Chairman: Do you agree, Malcolm,
in your position?
Mr Keight: Yes. The last estimate,
although it keeps rising, is that, with the introduction of top-up
fees, students will graduate with an average debt of £21,000.
Obviously, there are ways of limiting that debt.
Q388 Chairman: Is the AUT position
to get the students out from home, get them out from under the
feet of their guardians, parents or whatever?
Mr Keight: It is not for us to
say what choice students make in that respect.
Q389 Chairman: Does the policy that
institutes that they stay at home as against them going somewhere
across the country and meeting other people influence the kind
of education they get? You must have a view on that.
Mr Keight: I think one can always
say that that experience, which most of our generation had, was
beneficial and was part of the higher education experience.
Q390 Chairman: The working class
boy next to you went to Liverpool, for goodness sake, another
working class area. He never went to Cambridge or Oxford.
Professor Bruckdorfer: I think
it will be interesting to look at France because they have a policy
largely of keeping people in their areas unless you are going
to one of the grands écoles. They very much do organise
their universities in that way. Undoubtedly, there is a beneficial
experience outside pure education in going to live independently
somewhere else.
Q391 Chairman: Malcolm, I interrupted
you. You ought to say what you wanted to say.
Mr Keight: I was just saying that
those choices will be made by students for their own reasons and
it is not really for us to say what those choices should be but
what they should not be is a denial of that choice through funding
and other incentives to enable students to study at the institution
of their choice.
Q392 Dr Iddon: The evidence we have
received from universities is that they do not support moves which
would lead to the Government directly interfering in the academic
and research priorities of individual universities, yet we have
received other evidence, it would not surprise you if it came
from Exeter University's chemistry department where the staff
there would be glad if the Government had intervened to prevent
the closure of Exeter. My question is, do you think there are
any circumstances when the Government should intervene in the
management of universities and particularly to prevent closure
of departments?
Mr Keight: I think the short answer
to that is "yes". Clearly, the autonomy of institutions
is vital to a democratic society and I think that is something
that we must always guard preciously. Having said that, clearly
Government, through their funding regimes, are creating an environment
which British institutions work in and, if they create an environment
which leads to—and I will come back to Exeter in a moment
because that is not the best example—subjects being lost,
subjects of strategic importance, subjects like physic, chemistry
and maths being lost through the nature of the funding regime,
then obviously the Government are creating a wrong environment
and that does, as Richard suggested earlier, need a root and branch
review. Where one gets decisions such as Exeter where a good university
decides to close a strategically important subject where student
demand is buoyant and research is created of national, and some
would say international, excellence, one must raise questions
as to why individual institutions make that sort of choice. If
the environment generally did not provide institutions with excuses
to make those sorts of choices, then it would be more difficult.
Q393 Dr Iddon: What do you think
the Government could do to save Exeter, just to take one example?
There are others of course as well.
Mr Keight: I think the previous
Secretary of State has taken the first step to flag up or ask
the funding council to flag up that the Government do regard subjects
as strategically important and too important simply to be left
to the short-term demands of the market. That is the first valuable
step. One would hope that the funding council would respond to
that by demonstrating to these institutions, which have some very
diligent accountants, to indicate that there are financial incentives
to retaining these strategically important subjects.
Q394 Chairman: My last question is,
would you take money from five and five-star departments and put
it in fours at this moment in time?
Mr Keight: Given that more than
enough money has already been expended in the E-university, I
suppose it will have to come from somewhere else and again, as
has been said, a slightly reduced gradient in terms of the cliff—
Q395 Chairman: Amongst the comrades
in universities, they are helping somebody else. You have told
me that grade-four departments are brilliant. Let us take the
money from the excellence and give it to the fours. Is it not
the problem that they do not want to give it?
Mr Keight: Robbing Peter to pay
Paul—
Q396 Chairman: Well, at this moment
in time until we get it straight. You could take the money now,
you could argue for that and say, "We want more money from
the fives to go into fours to keep them alive." That is often
used as the argument.
Mr Keight: In terms of a short-term
stopgap, then that would be . . .
Professor Bruckdorfer: It is the
least worse option.
Q397 Chairman: Why are students not
sitting in any more to protect departments? What is gone wrong?
Professor Bruckdorfer: Oh, my
goodness! They have been depoliticised considerably.
Q398 Dr Harris: I just want to bring
you back to this question of scientific careers in teaching. Is
it a rational point of view that more people/students/graduates
will go into teaching and research and lecturing, which are relatively
less well paid, and all we have to do is increase their level
of debt burden under the Government's new plans? Do you think
there is a rational argument for that?
Mr Keight: You have to make the
career attractive and it is anything but that at the moment. The
biggest disincentive is that immensely demanding apprenticeship
through years of postgraduate study which is not recognised in
salary levels. We are not just about moving post-doctorate salary
levels up to average graduate salary levels in the economy generally.
So, there is still a lot more to be done there. Having to cope
with that is also allied to this notion which is still held by
some of the Research Councils that, in order to get into the (inaudible),
you are expected to go through two, three or four fixed-term contracts
and you may find that, if you do not make it, you are on fixed-term
contracts for life.
Q399 Dr Harris: Perhaps you would
like to comment on my question which was about debt. What I am
trying to get at is, do you think that the problem in recruiting
science graduates into teaching in schools or lecturing or into
research is going to be made more difficult if the level of debt
increases as it is Government policy to do?
Professor Bruckdorfer: The debt?
Q400 Dr Harris: The debt of graduates?
Professor Bruckdorfer: As far
as school teaching is concerned, I would have thought that if
there are adequate methods of funding teacher training in which
they get a reasonable stipend to do that and if the debt repayment
is held off until afterwards, which is I think the normal practice,
and if there is proper remuneration as a teacher, that situation
might improve. In fact, in biological sciences, I do not think
there is a problem at all. They are paid the same. For some reason,
there are rather specific issues especially related to physics
teaching. My daughter happens to be a physics teacher; she is
family raising at the moment and she will ultimately no doubt
go back to that profession. It is interesting that so few girls
generally interest themselves in physics. I am not quite sure
why that is but that has been a tradition for some time. So, it
is a continuing factor that increasingly teaching is becoming
a female profession. That is as far as the school teachers are
concerned. I think the major problem as far as lecturing is concerned
and becoming a lecturer or university professor is concerned is
partly that they are low paid generally which has been a sore
for many years and I do not want to go over that problem at this
stage but, in addition to that, are the general anxieties that
staff have and that rubs off on to the students, especially postgraduate
students, and, as a result of that, that is seen as an unattractive
option. I do not think so far that has been influenced so much
by levels of debt, but I can fully imagine that it will get worse
as we get top-up fees and the debt actually increases.
Chairman: Thank you very much, indeed.
I know you could carry on for hours but you have given us a few
straight messages that are very helpful from the coalface, as
it were.
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