Examination of Witnesses (Questions 720
- 739)
WEDNESDAY 16 MAY 2007
PROFESSOR IAN
DIAMOND AND
PROFESSOR OLE
H PETERSEN
Q720 Jeff Ennis: Mr Sastry is suggesting
that.
Professor Diamond: I am agreeing
with Mr Sastry that one needs to do that but I also would completely
disagree that one does not need to do that basic research as well
and to have a really tensioned, competitive approach to funding
where there is a budget constraint and where international quality
peer review is the basis for doing that. To do it in any other
way would not be an appropriate mechanism, I would submit. We
do need a national competition.
Q721 Jeff Ennis: Professor Petersen,
have you any thoughts on Mr Sastry's conclusions?
Professor Petersen: In this respect
I agree very much with Professor Diamond. On the whole, one has
to be careful not to be hung up too much by these high costs of
peer review because they are very notional.
Q722 Chairman: You started off by
saying there was not enough money going into research. Fiona Mactaggart
said to you that you want to make sure that as much of the resource
gets through to the researcher rather than to the administration
of the process.
Professor Petersen: We have to
understand that these figures we are now talking about are notional.
This is not money that is taken out of the Research Councils'
budget. These are figures based on assessing how much time people
spend on these things, so it is a bit different. The real problem
is not this costing. The real problem is that there is not enough
money in the system. There are a lot of good researchers who are
not getting the funding that they need and therefore cannot do
the job that they are hired to do. That is the real problem in
the system, the insufficient amount of money that is in the Research
Council system and also in the whole university system. We have
to emphasise here that this is where we are at this moment in
time in a worse situation than many other competitor countries.
Q723 Chairman: Would you double it?
Treble it? How much more do we need?
Professor Petersen: In my particular
area where roughly speaking four out of five applications are
being rejected, I would suggest that there is a need for a doubling
of it in order to have a system that will work properly and allow
the people who are internationally competitive to work properly.
This has something to do with the future sustainability of research.
I do not think the UK's present position is sustainable in the
present situation. I think we will be overtaken by other countries
in the Far East and many of our European competitors, if you take
into account their size, are doing quite a bit better.
Professor Diamond: The administrative
costs within the Research Councils are under £10 million
per annum.
Q724 Stephen Williams: When you are
assessing a project that comes to you, what is uppermost in your
mind? Where is the balance? Is it the quality of the proposal
or the fact that you are going through an exercise of financial
rationing as well on behalf of the government effectively?
Professor Diamond: The only thing
that the commissioning panels look at is the scientific quality
of the research that comes in front of them.
Q725 Stephen Williams: Presumably
they know they cannot give the green light to every proposal that
comes forward because you would run out of money?
Professor Diamond: When you go
into a research funding round on any commissioning panel, remember
that the commissioning panels are made up primarily of academics
but typically also with what we call a user representative from
one of the stakeholders. They have a very clear view that the
decisions that they are making will leave a number of proposals
which would result in high, world class science being taken unfunded.
All they can do is their very best. All members of commissioning
panels work astonishingly hard. I personally was a member of a
number of commissioning panels in my previous life. One works
incredibly hard, with immense conscientiousness in order to ensure
that the ranking of grants that you end up with is the very best
that you can. Then, sadly, a line has to be drawn below which
people are rejected. At the margins, that line is a very difficult
line to draw. Discussions can often take hours around the end
ranking because you know that somebody is going to really have
some bad luck.
Professor Petersen: Something
that virtually all academics would agree on is that if success
rates fall to very low levels the assessment also becomes endangered.
If you have very low success rates, the precision of choosing
one project over another is not as good as it could be. In addition
to the fact that there will be a lot of very good research that
is unfunded, there will also be a degree of rightful frustration
in the academic community about why this project was chosen and
the other one was not. I take the example of Switzerland because
it is in many ways a very strong science country. Success rates
for the Swiss National Research Foundation are something around
40%. They have quite different types of success rates from what
we have and they have a very strong research system which is functioning
and attracting some of the best people from the UK to go and work
there.
Q726 Chairman: You said earlier that
there had been a substantial increase in research funding over
a period of time. There are academics who wanted to canonise Lord
Sainsbury because of his contribution to being seen to have made
a great difference, being not only the Science Minister for a
very long period of time but someone who took that science research
budget very seriously. There must be a better feeling about this.
Professor Petersen: That is recognised.
I think it is important for this Committee to fully understand
that there is a slight discrepancy—maybe more than a slight
discrepancy—between the view from the top and the view at
the coal face where the scientists are working and applying for
grants. In my own area, the success rates for applications to
the MRC have fallen in the last five years. What they see is increasing
difficulties in getting the funding that they need to do the work
that they are hired to do. Politicians at your level see that
there has been an enormous increase in the amount of spend and
that is good. All credit for that but one should not be too surprised
that a lot of people who are working at the coal face are not
quite so grateful because what they see is that it is getting
more and more difficult.
Q727 Jeff Ennis: Was the need to
reform the RAE cost driven or due to its inherent weaknesses and
flaws?
Professor Petersen: I suspect
that part of the fault lies in the academic community. Academics
have been worrying about the RAE, all the work that is going on
et cetera. That probably has gradually led to a feeling
that it is too much. A lot of academics did that in the sort of
environment where they thought maybe they could just get rid of
it and go back to the good old days where you did not have all
these audits et cetera. They did not realise that that is not
exactly what is going to happen. Something else will come instead
of it. Now a lot of people are regretting that they made all these
complaints about the RAE because now they see that what is probably
likely to be measured will be something that is much less attractive
than the original model. I suspect that that is one element of
it.
Q728 Jeff Ennis: It is a bit like
10 years of a Labour Government.
Professor Diamond: The Research
Councils have been very clear for a period of time that the Research
Assessment Exercise did not reward applied research, interdisciplinary
research, research related to professional practice and research
which was really having an economic impact or an impact on the
quality of life of the people of this country. These are rewards
that we absolutely have to develop into the higher education culture.
It has to be seen by someone at a junior level that they can invest
time in doing those sorts of things and that that is going to
be rewarded over time in their promotability within the universities.
That simply was not being done by the Research Assessment Exercise
and all those are reasons, I would submit, for a review and a
refreshment of the way in which we identify quality in allocating
research funding across the whole dual support system.
Q729 Mr Chaytor: Do you think that
the focus on the metrics peer review debate has distracted attention
from some of the more fundamental issues about the question of
concentration of research and the link between teaching and learning
or the link between research and business as against pure research?
Do you think what we are missing is a more fundamental review
of the bigger issues in the future of British research to make
British university research sustainable and we have been focusing
on the micro issues too much and not enough on the macro issues?
Professor Diamond: When you say
"we", do you mean your Committee?
Q730 Mr Chaytor: In the royal "we"
sense, I am speaking for the nation.
Professor Diamond: Speaking for
the Research Councils, we would not feel that the world had just
taken over by a review of the RAE and peer review. We have taken
those as extremely important parts of the research base and it
was right and proper to review both of them. At the same time,
we absolutely have to take forward a really proper step change
in the way that we engage with what, in Research Council speak,
is called knowledge transfer. That is the whole way in which the
research base impacts on business, on government, not only in
the linear way that people think of it where a light comes on
in a scientist's head and five years later there is a new product
on the shelf of a supermarket or whatever; but in a whole range
of ways, some of which are interactive, some of which involve
people transfer, some of which have a long time to have an impact.
We really have to properly measure and engage in a culture which
enables that to happen. That has been going on as a really major
focus for the Research Councils working with the higher education
sector very much over the last couple of years or so. It is an
area that the UK was rather better at than sometimes it believed.
It has been very easy to say, "We are not very good at this"
when you can string out very many examples of where we have been
good at it, but we also acknowledge it is an area where we have
to get better, particularly in some of the newer areas of the
economy. That has been a really major focus over the last little
while for the Research Councils. We as a nation have been really
focusing on that area and not simply focusing on the areas that
you describe. Also, there has been a recognition that we have
an academic community which, in some areas, is greying very rapidly,
where there has been a real need to have some strategic inputs
into a higher education base in order over the future that we
maintain the health of disciplines. That was a real focus of the
allocations to Research Councils in 2004 under that spending review.
It is something that we have been taking forward very much over
the last few years. Annually, it is my task on the Research Based
Funders' Forum to bring to that an annual report on the health
of disciplines and what is being done. I can report to you that
an enormous amount of work has been going on jointly between the
Funding Councils and the Research Councils to ensure that we do
have impact on a number of strategic areas that we see as being
in need of tender loving care; or we will see a decline in the
research base in this country. I do not think we have been focusing
totally on those areas. Many other things have been going on.
Q731 Mr Chaytor: Professor Petersen,
in the Royal Society's submission to the Committee it talks both
about the absolute need for international competitiveness in research
but also the intrinsic value of maintaining the interdependency
between teaching and research. Surely at the end of the day government
and the Funding Councils are going to have to decide whether they
want to concentrate research in those institutions that are internationally
competitive or whether they want to disseminate it across all
of our universities and maintain the link between teaching and
learning. Do you not envisage a time in the very near future when
some universities will simply have to become teaching only universities
in order to divert sufficient funds to the leading research intensive
universities to maintain international competitiveness?
Professor Petersen: We obviously
have to separate a little bit the university world because the
university is a very wide spectrum of institutions. There are
already now a lot of universities that are essentially teaching
universities. Most of the research that is funded by Research
Councils is going on in the Russell Group universities. There
is no doubt about that. This is in the public domain. Since we
are talking about research funding, I guess we can restrict the
discussion to the Russell Group universities because there is
an enormous amount of research. I am conscious of the fact that
there are centres of excellence elsewhere but the bulk of the
research is carried out in the Russell Group universities. Here
there are different views. There are some very strong universities
in the golden triangle who have the view that all the research
funding should go to them. They maintain the argument that only
in this way can the UK have real world class universities. That
is not the Royal Society's position. The Royal Society has always
been looking at the individual scientists. We have pointed out
many times that even though there is a certain concentration of
research funding in the golden triangle, there are top rated departments
in many other universities and we would miss out greatly if we
said no, we just want to have three universities, Oxford, Cambridge
and Imperial, and we do not want to do it in any other way. Again,
if I may use the example of Switzerland which is a small country,
by all standards they always come out on top. It is not the case
in Switzerland that there is one elite institution. The ETH is
a great institution but the new EPFL in Lausanne is by many standards
as good. Zurich University is a great university but so is Bern
and Geneva. When you look internationally, there is no particular
intellectual argument that says that we can only sustain our excellence
if we just choose two universities. We would lose out enormously.
They are top rated departments in many different places. I speak
as a person who for many years was head of physiology in Liverpool
which was the top rated department in this country, higher rated
than Oxford and Cambridge in exercise after exercise. It is a
very dangerous argument sometimes put out by people who have a
self-interest in these matters that all research funding needs
to be concentrated in certain universities. It is one of the good
things about the way the Research Assessment Exercise has been
done. It has not taken a view on whether a university is good
or not. Instead it is saying, "Let us show the research results
from various places and we will fund those areas that are high
quality." The Royal Society position is that we fund excellence
wherever it is to be found.
Q732 Chairman: You did give evidence
to the last higher education inquiry. You will remember the evidence
of Sir Richard Sykes on this point when he wanted a handful of
research rich universities, all of which would be in London and
the south east.
Professor Diamond: If we look
at 2005-06, 50% of Research Council funding goes to 10 universities.
The other side of the coin is that the Research Councils fund
in 155 higher education institutions. We fund competitively there.
That means there are people doing incredible research right across
the base and different places are focusing on different things.
For example, the example often given in this case is Dundee Abertay
which has world leading work on computer games and areas around
that. We must fund great research wherever we find it. We must
allow universities and higher education institutions to have the
flexibility to focus on particular areas, often respecting particular
local skills and markets. For example, I know that the University
of Bournemouth has a real focus on computer graphics which reflects
a cluster of industry around there. Whether that cluster has come
because Bournemouth University is good at it or Bournemouth University
is good at it because that cluster exists I do not know but we
must have a position where we fund great research wherever we
find it. We have already had a big discussion thus far about the
difficulties of getting funding and I can assure you therefore
that we do have that diversity of institution. Certainly while
there are some huge universities across the research board, there
is absolute excellence to be found in every institution.
Q733 Fiona Mactaggart: Professor
Diamond, earlier you were critical of Stephen's anecdotes. I am
going to tell you another anecdote.
Professor Diamond: I was not critical.
Q734 Fiona Mactaggart: When I was
in higher education, as someone who was very focused on teaching,
I felt that as the Research Assessment Exercise was coming down
the road people like me were locked away in cupboards if we could
or forced to research if we could not, while people in the management
of the institution concentrated on the real business of the institution
which was research. Is that an uncommon experience or do you think
it has been more widely felt?
Professor Diamond: The reason
I am being careful in what I say is that we are speaking anecdotally.
I cannot speak for every university. I have worked in universities
and I am now a leader of a Research Council. It is very clear
to me that students demand and deserve the highest quality teaching.
That should be done by the people who are best at doing it and
there is an enormous amount of excitement and energy given to
students by the cross over between research and teaching. Personally,
I believe passionately that no one should put the word "professor"
in front of their name unless they are prepared to profess their
subject right across the board. Here you can also find anecdotal
evidence in the United States that, as we move into a culture
where students are paying fees for university, they will expect
to see the very best and biggest names teaching in institutions
but only if that teaching is really excellent. I believe very
strongly that we have to have that cross over but that also we
need to reward teaching excellence in universities. I believe
there is a real need to have posts of professors of teaching excellence,
where their work has not simply impacted on their own students
but on the teaching of their subject more generally. It is incredibly
important that universities, in looking at promotion for their
staff, have lines of promotability for individual staff which
reflect the diversity of a university's mission. The university's
mission will always be a major mission of teaching and that means
that you have to have absolute excellence and reward those who
do it in universities, as well as research, as well as the other
areas such as knowledge transfer. That is why you absolutely need
to have that broader culture. Do I see that happening in universities?
I have to be absolutely honest with you. Anecdotally again, I
have seen a sea change over the last few years in many universities
when I have had the privilege in this job to go and talk to Vice
Chancellors right across the piece who have told me that they
are trying very hard to change the culture in their institution
to ensure that those sorts of things are rewarded.
Professor Petersen: That is a
very important area. One has some difficulties in really assessing
the situation. A lot of the evidence that is around is anecdotal.
You will hear many people say that the increasing emphasis on
research assessment has been to the detriment of teaching. This
is something that is commonly stated. I am not quite sure that
it is right. My own personal feeling is that the increasing workload
on academics which means that they work these many, many hours
we have already alluded to, probably in the research led universities
means that a lot of the extra time people are putting in has been
put in on the research side. Maybe that means that a lot of people
see that looming larger but I do not think that has meant that
people are spending less time on their teaching or preparing their
teaching. In many universities, including my own, the pressure
that is generated on the academic world has meant that people
have thought very carefully about how to do their teaching in
the best and most efficient way. There is a great deal of emphasis
on high quality teaching. The general view that the Royal Society
has is that teaching is extremely important. We are talking about
educating the next generation of scientists. We believe that teaching
in a research led environment is, in a general sense, a good thing.
When I think back to my own time as an undergraduate, I was enormously
inspired by being taught by people who did research and who gave
me that enthusiasm for it. I would like to think that is something
that is also happening now. Serious people do want to teach very
well and to put a lot of emphasis on the next generation as extremely
important. The quality of teaching is really important. In my
own field, one of the main results of our research ultimately
is to produce better textbooks. That is one particular goal to
think about. We want the knowledge of the people who are going
to take over after us to be better than our knowledge. The two
things should and must go hand in hand. We have to make sure that
happens.
Professor Diamond: The writing
of a textbook would not be something that would be rewarded entirely
by a Research Assessment Exercise unless you tried to say that
that was a good thing and reward it properly. That is one of the
areas we believe you need to do more in.
Q735 Fiona Mactaggart: That is partly
what I am interested in. What is research inspired teaching? Are
people out there really clear about what it is? It is a push to
get more research inspired teaching. Is there a risk that we will
not have research inspired teaching but we will have a kind of
apartheid of teachers and researchers who occasionally talk to
each other?
Professor Petersen: We must avoid
that at all costs. I absolutely agree. It has been a traditional
strength of this country and it could be and should be a continuing
strength that we keep those two things together. It is a delicate
balancing act because there are such enormous pressures on time
but it is a really important goal. It is something, I agree, that
has not been assessed generally speaking in the best possible
way. It is absolutely not clear to me at all how a metrics driven
approach will help in any way with regard to that. We could think
about ways in which one could build it into the system and that
has nothing to do with the method, whether it is a peer review
system or a metrics driven system. It would be more easily brought
into a peer review system, quite frankly.
Q736 Chairman: Do they stress the
relationship between research and teaching in the Swiss example
you have referred to?
Professor Petersen: I do not think
it is fundamentally different in the good research led universities
that I personally would know. In all the conversations I have
with good scientists at scientific conferences, people are not
talking dismissively about teaching. This is a misconception that
has been raised by some people, that people who are doing research
are not interested in teaching and so on. It has not been my experience.
When I talk to colleagues, mostly at scientific conferences internationally,
people are enthusiastic about their teaching. They fully understand
its great importance and they want to do their very best.
Q737 Fiona Mactaggart: You said that
it has not been assessed. In earlier exchanges one of the things
that we have recognised is that things that are not assessed or
funded do not get properly looked after. There has been some kind
of push to directly fund research informed learning. Has that
changed anything or has it just papered over it all?
Professor Diamond: I am the wrong
person to ask that question. I would hope that it had.
Q738 Fiona Mactaggart: Are you the
right person to ask to describe what research informed learning
looks like?
Professor Diamond: It is something
that I have given lectures about so I ought to be able to answer
to some extent. It is not a simple answer that I would give you
in one sentence. You need to be reflecting the very best research
practice, the very best recent research knowledge. Neither of
those needs to be done by a great researcher but in the whole
learning experience being able to undertake one's project in a
laboratory with very good people is an extremely positive experience.
The whole link between great research and how your teaching develops
over time has to be something that is brought together in a positive
way. The one thing I would not say is that you always need great
researchers to do research led teaching. That is really important.
You can see examples of brilliant teachers who are doing research
led teaching in a brilliant way. What you do need is a really
holistic view of the learning experience and the way in which
students are at university, not only if you like to learn a set
of vocational skills but to broaden their understanding of the
way in which knowledge is generated and develops so that when
they go out into the wider world, into whatever careers they subsequently
take on, they understand that much broader knowledge. If we can
engender that, then we have engaged in research based teaching.
Professor Petersen: In my own
field which is laboratory based science, one example of it would
be that students can undertake projects working with research
equipment in a research environment where other people are doing
real, cutting edge research. By doing that and seeing the example
of other people, by interacting with some of the people who do
experiments, you will get a direct feeling and understanding of
how the scientific process works. This is something that will
preferentially occur in an environment where there is a substantial
amount of research funding, where there are a lot of researchers
around. That would be one example of research informed learning.
Q739 Stephen Williams: Can I return
briefly to the dismal science of metrics? The Department says
that it is going to be a single, over-arching framework within
which a differentiated approach is possible for groups of disciplines.
I would take that to mean that arts and humanities will continue
to have peer review and stem subjects and everyone else will get
metrics, unfortunately from your perspective. Will that make it
harder for departments to cooperate on different areas of research?
For instance, archaeology is clearly a mix of history and perhaps
physics as well.
Professor Petersen: There will
be some problems in those areas and that has been a concern of
the Royal Society. Mathematics are a clear example, mostly labelled
together with science. It cannot be assessed in the same way.
The future, for example, of biology is very much based on quantitative
approaches and there will be a need for mathematicians to work
very closely with biologists. Of course, a lot will depend on
the details which we still do not understand but there certainly
are dangers when different subjects that have to work closely
together are assessed in what appears to be, under the current
proposals, fundamentally different ways. It will cause considerable
problems and we are very worried about that.
Professor Diamond: I take the
point you have made that the assessment or the reward mechanism
will influence behaviour but if we want research to take place
across the entire piece we simply have to engender a culture whereby
people feel relaxed, able and rewarded to spend the time that
it takes to undertake that research. It is not absolutely clear
to me, because I do not know what the details of these systems
will look like, how having a slightly different system in different
areas will impact on that. That is something we will have to look
at when people have come out with it and certainly I hope that
they do take that into account. At the end of the day we have
to have opportunities for people to work across boundaries in
some of the key areas that Research Councils UK are saying are
important for directed research. They are cutting across three
or four Research Councils. There has been a magnificent programme
the Research Councils have funded in recent years on the rural
environment and land use. That has involved, in a really exciting
way, biologists working with environmental scientists, working
with social scientists, really to impact on policy and activities
in the rural areas of this country and indeed beyond. We simply
have to have an environment for science—by "science"
I mean research—across the entire base in this country which
enables people to work together. We need to be aware that the
metrics should not impact on what individual scientists are doing.
That is the whole thrust of Research Councils UK's input in this
area.
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