Examination of Witnesses (Questions 560
- 572)
WEDNESDAY 21 MARCH 2007
PROFESSOR ALAN
GILBERT AND
PROFESSOR MICHAEL
WORTON
Q560 Paul Holmes: If you looked over
the last few years and you were a pessimist, you could say that
we had an Education Secretary not long ago, Charles Clarke, who
launched a tirade, saying we have too many people studying medieval
philosophy or whatever it was, and in the argument over tuition
fees that we had, the plus point of tuition fees, we were told,
was that since students are going to be out of all this debt,
and you referred to this earlier, they will start shopping around
more for what it is going to buy them, what job they are going
to get out of this, so it would push people out of the arts and
humanities, and we are told allegedly that we have a Stalinist
in the Treasury who likes to manipulate behaviour with grants
and money and means-testing. Are all these three, linked together,
an indication that the aim is to reduce the role of arts and humanities
in higher education and to concentrate more on practical, utilitarian
subjects?
Professor Gilbert: I think it
would be good if all politicians, and they probably have already,
read Lord Rees's book, Our Final Century, the hypothesis
being that humankind, human civilisation has a 50-50 chance of
getting to the end of this century, and the answers, if they are
going to be given, are probably not going to be given by scientists
because the real challenge is how this species can learn to build
sustainable civil societies. Much of the most important research
work in the world is actually being done by combinations of social
scientists and people in the arts and humanities, so, of all the
generations, we should be the last one to discount the importance
of social science and humanities research.
Professor Worton: Without waving
too many shrouds, I think that the arts and humanities community
has been somewhat defensive and has bound itself up in a kind
of the winding clothes of defensiveness. What we have not been
saying is how many of the problem-solving skills we are actually
imparting to our students, and I think, therefore, that what we
need to be doing is actually be much more explicit in the nature
of the skills, the extraordinarily broad range of skills that
our students are gaining and encourage them to be involved much
more in things like internships and so on, which is already beginning
in the research-intensive universities as well as in the other
kinds of universities.
Q561 Chairman: Perhaps I can ask
you a rather different question before we go into the last section.
Alan, you have been here for how long from Australia?
Professor Gilbert: Three years.
Q562 Chairman: How do you view it?
Do you get out of bed in the morning and think, "I'm glad
I'm in HE in the UK", or what do you feel is the health of
HE in the UK at the moment? What is your feeling about it?
Professor Gilbert: I think it
is in relatively good health, but higher education around the
world is in a state of enormous flux. Higher education institutions
have had a monopoly of higher learning for 900 years and it is
dissolving in our generation, so, when you talk about the health
of higher education, I think this is a very healthy system under
great stress. It is not without faults and risks, but it operates
in an international context which is very fluid and in which the
future is being shaped by parts of the world that previously we
did not look to for advice or for models to follow. We have to
be very nimble and able to move very quickly.
Q563 Chairman: Michael, do you want
to add to that?
Professor Worton: A quick dart,
given that we have such influential people interrogating us! I
think one of the best things which has happened to UK HE plc has
been the Science and Innovation Investment Framework, the commitment
of the Government basically to double the funding for research.
That has been enormously important and to have had a commitment
from the very top of the Government to science research has, I
think, been crucial and to have had a minister like Lord Sainsbury
was wonderful for science. However, it is unfortunate in the way
that the decision was made by the DTI to claw back money. Okay,
it is a one-off and decisions have to be made, but what we do
need is more statements, and I was saying this to Mr Darling when
he was at UCL last week, that we do need to have more reiteration
of the commitment to research on the part of the Government. People
are asking us from overseas, "Has the UK Government stopped
believing, as it used to, in research in the UK?"
Q564 Chairman: We will see this afternoon
perhaps.
Professor Worton: Quite.
Q565 Mr Chaytor: If I could ask you
first about the recent research councils' consultation on their
methodology for allocating funding, are you broadly happy with
what they are proposing?
Professor Worton: I think one
of the interesting things which came out of it was, okay, it cost
£196 million of which 62% is incurred by the preparation
and submission of applications, but is this value for money? I
think what is coming out of it is the fact that again, provided
there is proper developed and sustained consultation, there are
some important decisions to be made about the changes to the pattern
of awards. I myself would actually welcome a move towards, if
you like, larger, collaborative awards. I think there are issues
here about the question of consolidation of awards so that we
might move more towards five-year awards rather than three-year
awards, and issues on the reduction of the number of applications,
I think, are a really big challenge that we need to be looking
at, recognising also that the simple thing to do would be to say,
"Let's move the burden much more into the universities, so,
rather than having it in the assessment at the moment in the research
councils, let's have it in the universities". Some responses
have been that this is a very unfair move, but I think there are
ways in which one could actually look at this slightly more creatively,
saying, "We all want to reduce the number of wasted applications,
but many applications are useful, even if not funded, because
they've got people thinking together, they're talking together
and they're seeing the way forward", so, if that is managed
properly within the institutions, I think this actually can be
enormously creative. That is where again I think we need to be
looking at how the research assessment things, like research funding,
are interlocked with the way in which we are managing our own
institutions and taking our own institutions forward.
Q566 Mr Chaytor: Would it have made
more sense to have had this review done in parallel with the RAE
review? If we have a dual system, there seems to be huge fragmentation
between the two legs of the dual system.
Professor Worton: Some of us have
made that point, yes.
Professor Gilbert: There are a
couple of points on this. One is, I think, that there is a danger
in the concept of waste, of equating with waste the unfunded,
unsuccessful applications. I think there is often an immensely
creative process that goes on when people reflect on submissions
that they are going to make. In many cases, what is a failed application
in one year is a successful application in another arena or in
another year, so I think the idea that research management is
costly really needs to be significantly looked at. The RAE actually
costs about one per cent of the total funds driven by it, and
that is very efficient. The RAE is 10 times as efficient as one
of the exemplary research councils, Cancer Research UK, and that
is not a criticism of Cancer Research UK, but it is just to put
into context the cost of the RAE. The only thing I would add to
that is that I could not stress more strongly that peer review
has increasingly to mean expert review. "Peers" does
not mean mates; "peers" means that you are being judged
by the best people in the world, equipped by knowledge and experience
to make a judgment, and I only say that because the concept of
peer review is actually being cheapened in lots of ways and probably
primarily by the ranking of universities where "peer review"
means judgment by people who do not know and who just vote on
the basis of reputation. So I think a tightening up of what "peer
review" means might be one of the really strong outcomes
of all of this.
Q567 Mr Chaytor: Would it be a reasonable
outcome for the research councils' methodology and the RAE methodology
to be at odds with each other? Can the system sustain two different
approaches?
Professor Gilbert: We talk about
the dual system, but I also think that there is very great importance
in the research councils and the Wellcome Trust and other bodies
appraising the system from a somewhat different perspective. Consolidation
is not necessarily in the interests of the system.
Professor Worton: I agree completely
with that, and I would also add that we need to remember that
we do not actually have simply a dual-support system, but we have
also got many other sources of funding. If you look at some of
the most highly sought-after research funding, it comes from,
let us say, the Gates Foundation. If you really want to make a
difference in global health, you need money from Gates, but the
way that Gates funds is a completely different way from the way
the research councils do. In the humanities, the Andrew W Mellon
Foundation in the US funds in a completely different way; I have
had £1.2 million from them and they peer assess in a very
good way, but it is very different. They do not go down the route
of responsive-mode funding, but very often it is a question of
identifying needs, as with Gates, and finding the very best people
in the world, which is a different mode of using peer review.
I think increasingly it is the fact that we have these various
different models working together which is one of the strengths
of the UK and we need to be recognising that there are these different
modes of peer review because I am slightly nervous myself about
a narrow, simplistic and over-subjective view of peer review.
Q568 Mr Chaytor: In terms of national
strategy, how do you see the balance between investment which
would prioritise the driving up of quality and national competitiveness
and the investment in research which would diversify our system
and encourage new areas of expertise to develop? Are you centralisers
or are you diversifiers?
Professor Worton: Government investment,
do you mean, in research?
Q569 Mr Chaytor: I am thinking in
terms of our national strategy. Should we be for ever trying to
concentrate our research on centres of excellence or should we
be, as a point of principle, encouraging the capacity of smaller
institutions to develop new research capacities?
Professor Worton: Those two models
are not necessarily opposed.
Q570 Mr Chaytor: But if there is
a pot of something—
Professor Worton: I would certainly
go for critical mass, and I would argue it is actually essential
in the arts and humanities as well, even though it is 25% of the
research base in the UK. Excellence is much more distributed than
in big science for economic, financial reasons. However, I think
that it is crucial to have absolute, world-leading, critical mass
centres of excellence, but with spokes out to the others, so in
a sense the very top, the real leaders are actually bringing others
along with them and working with them.
Q571 Chairman: When Sir Richard Sykes
was in front of this Committee the last time, he wanted a handful,
to which I said, "Only five research-rich universities? They
will all be in London and the South East", to which he said,
"So be it". You would not agree with that, would you?
Professor Worton: As a Scot and
a graduate of Edinburgh, it is very difficult! I do think here
that actually the excellence of the work must determine it. I
would be very nervous to move to a national or a governmental
regional policy which says that we will create these. That is
not the way it works.
Q572 Chairman: But you would not
deny that York has come through the rankings as a quite fine research
university? You would not decry that, would you?
Professor Worton: Of course not.
Professor Gilbert: I think this
is a very important issue and I agree entirely. We have got to
start with the assumption that there is no such thing as north-western
knowledge or UK knowledge. In research, excellence has to be defined
in unqualified international terms or it is not research. It follows
that, if you try to segment some funds to give to certain institutions
or kinds of institutions, you are probably going to be wasting
resources because there has to be a fundamental chasing of excellence.
That means investment in scale, because the nature of knowledge
creation and indeed knowledge transfer is now related to scale.
What it must not mean, however, is that you simply fossilise history,
because creativity will change, it will emerge in other places.
If excellence is only in the South East, you should only invest
in the South East; but if that is the truth about excellence,
it will be to the grave disadvantage of this country. I do not
think you can find another economy this size which is as uni-nodal
as the UK economy. If you look at the main international competitors,
they are a mixture of very healthy sub-economies often with different
economic growth patterns, so, if one industry gets into difficulty,
the broader economy is driven by a multi-nodal economic reality.
Every other region in the UK is below average because the South
East is so potent. As I say, if that is the reality, then invest
in it; but we ought to hope that other regions in the UK can build
nodes of excellence which can compete. If it is possible, the
UK should evolve policy frameworks which allow that to happen.
That would be good policy.
Chairman: We have to draw stumps there,
only because I will not get a seat for the Budget otherwise! Thank
you very much. It has been invigorating and please remain in touch
with us because this is quite a big enterprise we are involved
in.
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