Geoscientist Online

When governments talk about selectivity, it is nothing to do with excellence and everything to do with money says Ted Nield

Geoscientist 18.8 August 2008

Almost 20 years ago I was in Swansea interviewing Professor Colin Grey-Morgan for The Independent. The Universities Funding Council (UFC), had just performed the very first Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), costing 100 person-years of university staff time and £4 million. Colin’s physics department had been rated a lowly 2, based on low publication output. Yet they were not unproductive. They had spent almost 10 years developing a revolutionary analytical technique called Resonance Ionisation Spectroscopy. Unfortunately, UFC’s five-year publication window did not allow this broader view.

RIS was exactly the sort of work that Government policy wanted to encourage, and a DTI/industry partnership eventually rewarded the department with £1m; but the damage had been done. They were a “2”. What had this rating got to do with “research excellence”? Colin asked.

If money were no object, a thousand flowers could bloom. Consider university entrance - and the process whereby school-leavers going to university have to achieve certain grades in order to qualify. Most people, including those in the media, assume wrongly that this has to do with ensuring that the "best" candidates get places.  But it is nothing of the kind, and it never has been.  A level/Scottish Higher Grades for school-leavers have always been set so as to allow in the right number of government-funded undergraduates. It is all about money, and how many students the government can afford to have in universities. 

In the days when students got grants and cost a lot more, this was even more true - hence there were fewer students in those days, and hence the need in the 1990s to scrap grants in order to achieve university expansion - by shifting the burden of student funding to the beneficiaries.  The clue that always gave this game away lay with "mature students".  Mature students pay their own way, and they have never needed A level grades to get into any university.  This fact was always dressed up as reflecting concern for those who never had the chance to do A levels.  But good intentions like that are always helped along very nicely when the public purse doesn't have to open in order to achieve them.

Entrance grades are driven by market forces, within recruitment limits set by government. They are nothing to do with “excellence”. And so it is with research.

Restricting government research funds to certain projects invokes two things – peer review, and at a grander level, “strategy” – or deciding where on the research roulette table to plonk the state’s chips. And this is where it comes unstuck, as Doris Day knew well; the future is not ours to see. Mendel’s peas, Darwin’s barnacles, Faraday’s dynamo are well-known examples that would never have been funded by any contemporary strategic plan. But alas, funding agencies tend not to take their philosophies from the harsh realities of show-tune lyrics. Our modern strategies do two things – they flatter us that we are in control of destiny, and fool us into thinking that the result is not still a lottery, just because it no longer looks like one.

My Independent piece evoked fury from the UFC, some of whose members actually did their best to get me fired. I preserve one copy, sent to my employer by a man with a knighthood, with “Should be SACKED!” scrawled across my name in a childish hand. So it is odd to think that now, after two decades of RAEs, universities have learnt so well how to subvert the existing system that they are agitated about plans to change it.

Much discussion has centred on the assessment mechanism. Pragmatic that may be; but the idealist in me wishes to call it complicity. For all the good any mechanism does, after proposals have been through peer review, funding agencies might was well employ the “Camelot” method. Renting out Guinevere and Lancelot for a day or two would save everyone a lot of time and money and, I suspect, turn out with hindsight to have been just as “strategic”.

A medical academic once presented an obstetrics class with the following family planning scenario. “Father alcoholic, largely absent. Mother terminally consumptive. Family, already living in grinding poverty, with high sibling mortality. Mother now pregnant again." He looked up. Who recommends termination? Nearly all hands signified assent. “Congratulations gentlemen” said the lecturer; “You have just murdered Beethoven”.

Further reading

• Nield, Ted 1989: A £4m nonsense to rate university research. The Independent Monday 13 November p17
• Petford, Nick: 2008 Beating the system; Goalposts on the move, Geoscientist 18.2 p3, 18-21).
• Taleb, Nicholas 2007: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Hardcover) Random House ISBN 978-1400063512