Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
PROFESSOR ALASDAIR
SMITH, DR
GERRY LAWLESS
AND MR
STEVE EGAN
27 MARCH 2006
Q80 Dr Harris: Whether or not you
had the 700 would not, you say, make any difference. Is that what
you are telling us?
Dr Lawless: No. The proposal is
to invest in other areas of the University.
Q81 Dr Harris: The 700,000 that you
are not getting of the QR funding that you have attracted, which
is going to other areas, however legitimate, if you were getting
that, it would not affect the judgment that the University has
made in respect of this proposal because it is not about the financial
viability of chemistry.
Dr Lawless: That is correct.
Professor Smith: I do not accept
that interpretation. We have looked at the funding of all of our
departments in a new resource allocation mechanism that is fully
transparent. When in that model Chemistry is attributed with the
full QR funding of £1.4 million that it currently gets on
the back of the 2001 RAE, and when it pays its share of various
central costs, Chemistry roughly speaking is in a small deficit
or a small surplus, depending on how one attributes some issues.
It is absolutely not a financial problem as far as the current
year is concerned. When all of the QR funding for Chemistry is
attributed to Chemistry, Chemistry on its current faculty is more
or less at financial equilibrium. The real issue about QR funding
is that, as I am sure you know, QR funding is related to the volume
of faculty submitted in the last RAE. The number of Chemistry
faculty at Sussex is now approximately half of what it was in
2001 and therefore, if there were no change in the funding per
unit of quality and if Sussex Chemistry in 2008 were judged to
be of roughly the same level of quality as it was in 2001, on
volume alone, half of that QR grant would go. A major consideration
for the University in thinking forward, as I am sure you agree
universities ought to do in planning for the future, is that Chemistry
at the moment is roughly speaking in financial balance but after
the 2008 RAE it will lose three quarters of a million pounds of
its current income.
Q82 Dr Iddon: That is where we get
the figure of 800,000 from. Do you want to respond, Dr Lawless?
Dr Lawless: If that sum had been
available since the last RAE and had been invested in Chemistry,
we would have been able to make those appointments and we would
have the volume factor that I was worried about losing in the
next RAE.
Q83 Dr Iddon: Does the fact that
the RAE is going to be slimmed down and therefore the metrics
will presumably be altered, because they are going to be measuring
the same metrics on a different approach which we heard last week,
make any difference to your planning for the next RAE. Is that
a factor you will bear in mind?
Professor Smith: It is. However,
looking at some of the key metrics in relation to Chemistry at
Sussex the metrics would not encourage one to think that switching
from the existing RAE to a new metrics based system would favour
this. I believe a switch from a QR system based on RAE to a QR
system based on metrics is likely to be systematically unfavourable
to institutions like Sussex. That is, relatively small, research
based universities.
Q84 Dr Iddon: Mr Egan, does it concern
you that the QR funding that is identified with a department has
systematically over the years, as Dr Lawless says, been used to
support other areas causing, as he would see it, the risk to the
department that leads to the potential vulnerability of this department?
Are you relaxed about that?
Mr Egan: The money that we give
to institutions for research is a block grant with teaching. It
is for institutions to determine how they stand and allocate that
money. In certain circumstances, it would be entirely appropriate
for institutions to invest in one area and disinvest in another.
Otherwise, you have an ossified system that is not dynamic that
responds to the needs of its stakeholders. We believe that the
institution is in the best place to make those judgments rather
than us in the centre. Our approach is that institutions should
make those decisions.
Q85 Dr Iddon: I am flabbergasted.
Are you telling us that the department works its guts out for
five, six or seven years to get itself in a five star or five
position, to get itself the funding to be financially viable and
then that funding can be awarded by a vice-chancellor or a Senate
to another department and let that vital department collapse?
That is what I am hearing.
Mr Egan: Yes.
Professor Smith: I do not think
it would be sensible for the Committee to go down this route under
a misapprehension. I simply do not accept what Gerry said, that
in the past the QR grant was somehow being filched to support
other activity. If I can repeat what I said about the current
allocation of resources, when we transparently allocated to Chemistry
all of its QR and all of its income from teaching, subtracting
its share of central costs and so on, at the moment chemistry
is roughly speaking in balance. Two years ago we had many more
faculty, more or less the same number of students and the same
QR grant. A little bit of simple arithmetic will establish that
we had a much larger salary bill and larger research income. Research
income, as this Committee well knows, does not pay the full costs
of the research activity. We can be confident that if we work
back a fully transparent budgetary model from this year, where
chemistry is covering its costs, roughly speaking, to previous
years we would find that in previous years chemistry had been
in deficit, even allowing for the full QR grant being attributed
to it. I do not accept that the QR grant has been taken away from
chemistry.
Q86 Dr Turner: What about the income
from IP and other sources? What is that income stream that is
generated by the chemistry department for Sussex and how much
of that does the department see? As far as I can tell from the
accounts, it is 108,000.
Professor Smith: The IP income
earned by the chemistry department is fully attributed to the
chemistry department in our resource allocation system.
Dr Turner: I am told it is rather more
than 108,000.
Q87 Dr Iddon: We are getting conflicting
evidence on this. I am picking up vibrations from members of that
department e-mailing me that the whole of the intellectual property
earnings for the department, which I gather is probably the largest,
if not the largest, IP income for University of Sussex, is not
being credited to the department. We need to know as a Committee
whether this is true or not.
Professor Smith: The table I have
in front of me showing the detailed, full economic financial statements
for chemistry for 2005-06 attributes £50,000 of income from
intellectual property exploitation to the chemistry figures so
they are included.
Q88 Dr Turner: What is the total
figure that comes to the whole institution from IP that has been
generated by the department? Gerry, do you know that figure?
Dr Lawless: Approximately, for
one grant alone, half a million. The amount allocated to the chemistry
department last year was 4K rather than 50K.
Dr Iddon: I wonder if we could sort this
out because I have conflicting evidence here. I have heard that
there is considerable intellectual property going into the university
as a result of patents or whatever that chemistry has generated
and that it is not feeding its way into the department. It is
being used elsewhere in the university. That is what we are picking
up. We need to be sure about that.
Q89 Chairman: Could you write to
us on this?
Professor Smith: I would be very
happy to do that.
Chairman: We are in a confusing situation
and we need to have the answers. We will write to you with the
questions.
Dr Turner: It would help if we had audited
accounts.
Chairman: We will write to you with the
information that we want.
Q90 Adam Afriyie: What evidence do
you have that chemical biology will be more popular with students
than chemistry?
Professor Smith: We do not expect
that chemical biology will be more popular with students than
chemistry. The proposal to focus chemistry onto areas of chemistry
related to the biological sciences was a proposal driven by a
belief that the University, for the reasons I have already talked
about, was not in a position where we could support a full, across
the board Chemistry department. This seemed to be the strongest
area in which to build research strength with a reduced student
load. We never imagined that a chemical biology department would
recruit students at the same rate that the chemistry department
did.
Q91 Adam Afriyie: Is that your view?
Dr Lawless: Yes. We had approximately
350 applicants for chemistry and 15 for chemical biology .
Q92 Adam Afriyie: That is a major
reduction in demand.
Dr Lawless: Five%.
Q93 Adam Afriyie: What is the evidence
that employers are demanding graduates in chemical biology as
opposed to chemistry?
Professor Smith: We have to wait
and see because the direction in which Sussex has been looking
in relation to the future of Chemistry is a direction that other
institutions have also been looking at. Faced with declining demand
for Chemistry degrees and difficulty in keeping a full scale Chemistry
department going, different institutions have looked at different
options. We do not yet have a very clear picture of how successful
these options are. In the discussion at Sussex over the last few
weeks, there have been some things said about the direction in
which Exeter has gone, focusing its remaining Chemistry on areas
related to biology. Some people say that has not worked; some
people say it has. Kings College is also looking at going in that
direction. It is a relatively new direction for institutions.
I think it would be very helpful—Des noticed I got perhaps
a bit over excited about the Royal Society of Chemistry earlier
on in the discussion—if the Royal Society of Chemistry possibly
supported by HEFCE or other otherwise, would ask on behalf of
the wider academic community some hard questions about the future
shape of chemistry. Is it really the case that if a university
wants to maintain chemistry in the future it has to be in the
traditional mode of having physical organic and inorganic chemistry;
or whether there are ways of making more focused chemistry departments
work by focusing in particular areas. The relationships between
chemistry and biology are perhaps one of the most encouraging
ways of going forward now.
Q94 Adam Afriyie: In a way, you are
taking a bit of a punt here. If that is the case, fewer students
and uncertainty about the demand in this area, what risk assessments
have you carried out not just for the course in its own right
or the department in its own right but, if this department fails—and
there are some big risks here—what would be the impact on
the rest of the university?
Professor Smith: The risks are
manageable. We are looking here at a relatively small part of
the university's provision. All the activities of a higher education
institution are at risk. Student demand goes up and down. Research
grant income goes up and down. RAE results are unpredictable.
Some of them turn out better, some of them worse, than you expected.
The scale of risks that would be associated with making a reduced
chemistry operation focused on biological, biomedical science
is containable within a reasonable university.
Q95 Adam Afriyie: Chemical biology
is an interdisciplinary subject. How can you have an interdisciplinary
subject if you do not have the core foundation of chemistry or
biology underpinning it?
Dr Lawless: It is absolutely impossible.
There is not a single example of such a department that merely
delivers chemical biology. We have had numerous meetings with
the RSC as the head of chemistry, with UK pharmaceutical groups,
and there is a clear message out there. What they require are
chemists, chemists with maybe an interest in chemical biology.
In designing the chemical biology programme which I did, we had
75% of those courses delivered by chemists. The other 25% were
by biochemists or chemical biologists. That is the market Chemical
biology is chemistry but with an interest in biology or an application
for biological problems.
Q96 Adam Afriyie: Judging from some
of the comments that you have made, would you favour a complete
closure of the chemistry department rather than this alternative?
If closure of the chemistry department is on the cards, would
you favour complete closure and not bother to open up this biological
chemistry option?
Dr Lawless: No. I hope that within
the next six weeks we will be able to come up with a very financially
viable plan that allows a vibrant, young, forward looking chemistry
department to exist at Sussex, because without it I fear that
the university as a whole will suffer.
Q97 Adam Afriyie: You are hopeful?
Dr Lawless: I am very hopeful.
Q98 Adam Afriyie: Professor Smith,
are you hopeful that you will have a vibrant chemistry department?
Professor Smith: I am always optimistic.
If that were the outcome of the discussions over the next six
weeks, I would be delighted.
Q99 Adam Afriyie: What role does
HEFCE play in these discussions? Are they instrumental in whether
or not chemistry survives?
Professor Smith: No. This is an
issue we have to sort out for ourselves. HEFCE are very helpful
in dealing with the cross-institutional issues when one looks
at closure or major changes of programmes but institutions have
to take the lead themselves in looking at making the kind of provision
they want to have viable. If I can backtrack one step and draw
attention to what I see as quite an important difference between
chemistry and some other sciences, which is quite relevant to
this discussion, lots of sciences are under pressure. You asked
earlier about physics. Physics in Sussex has very successfully
reshaped itself. It did so primarily when five years ago it was
faced with declining student numbers. It reshaped itself by completely
withdrawing from some areas of physics. Sussex does not do any
solid state physics or any material science. Physics in Sussex
concentrates on astronomy, particle physics and atomic physics.
The physics community is happy with that. It will look at the
Sussex operation and say that it is specialising at the high brow
end of physics; it is really good at it and that is fine. At least
the initial response from the chemistry community to a proposal
to focus chemistry in one particular area of specialism within
chemistry is to hold up its hands in horror and say, "That
is impossible: Chemical biology requires to be supported by the
rest". If that is objectively the case, then it is objectively
the case, but it does imply it seems to me that managing chemistry
is inherently more difficult than managing the other sciences.
The other sciences seem to be more flexible; issues of critical
mass are less pressing. The traditional view of chemistry is,
because we need the full range of chemistry in a functioning chemistry
department and each of them needs to operate at a level of critical
mass, a good chemistry department must therefore be a reasonably
big department. That poses real challenges to institutions that
are not recruiting enough students to support a big department.
It is a more difficult problem than exists in physics. It would
be quite good for the chemistry community to reflect on those
issues and look hard at the question whether it is possible to
look for the kind of flexible approach to excellence in teaching
and research that has been achieved in other subjects.
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