Puzzling risks to critical excellence

From the demise of well-known high street chains to the collapse of sterling, one topic dominates the news agenda these days, and the outlook is unrelentingly tough. Amidst the economic gloom, however, there is encouraging evidence of UK strength in one key area. When it comes to the source of new ideas, discoveries and innovations–our world-class universities–the UK more than holds its own, despite spending less of its GDP to support them than all but one other G8 nation.

The 2008 Research Assessment Exercise proved that the UK's top universities are doing research that is world-leading and internationally renowned. These universities will play a vital role in the eventual economic recovery and in maintaining the UK's ongoing competitive edge.

When it comes to industrial R&D, companies still do the development side but the majority of innovation now comes from the best universities. In fact, the UK is second only to the US in research excellence and, with just 1 per cent of the world's population, produces 9 per cent of publications and accounts for 12 per cent of citations. Universities are finding ways to improve healthcare and produce new non-carbon emitting sources of power. And they are spinning out their technical innovations into small and medium size companies, creating jobs and helping to make the economy competitive.

This Government has a good record on support for university research. During recent years, it has increased funding well ahead of inflation. In his annual grant letter last month to the Higher Education Funding Council for England, universities secretary John Denham stressed the need for maintaining this high level of funding for those institutions that carry out the largest volumes of world-class research. In particular, he singled out the importance of science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines.

I am therefore puzzled by signs that HEFCE may, at this most critical time, reduce the funding allocated to the UK's world-class universities (RF, 4/02/09, p1).

In the 2001 RAE, around one third of university research received the highest 5* rating. The changes for the 2008 exercise meant that 150 out of 159 institutions received the highest 4* rating for some of their research. The available funds will inevitably be spread more thinly, reducing the amount that will go to those universities with a critical mass of excellence.

That may contradict Denham's stated intention "to maintain high levels of funding for those institutions with the largest volumes of world-class research". And begs the question of why we have a dual funding system if HEFCE cannot fund it appropriately.

The RAE 2008 clearly shows that pockets of excellence exist across the UK. But solitary islands of excellence are no good if you are trying to solve global problems. For that you need concentrated multidisciplinary excellence, sustained by long term funding. It took the best engineers, physicists and computer scientists in the world to design and build CERN; the development of what became the World Wide Web is just one result of the creative problem-solving triggered by the research at CERN. The scale of the challenges that face the planet make it very unlikely that their solutions will arise in places where a critical mass of researchers is not assembled.

Advocates of thinly spread funding have argued that increasing funding for those pockets of excellence need not threaten the top universities, as they will be able to make up the lost funding from other sources.

However, this argument looks frail at present. The global economic outlook is such that external funders have rising pressures on their own resources. Without appropriate support and funding, we will end up with a mediocre system of higher education, and the UK will have an international reputation that reflects that.

In this economic climate, no sensible person or business would make an investment unless the benefits of doing so were clearly demonstrated. The UK’s leading universities have repeatedly proven their worth over successive RAEs, in the impact of their highly-rated research and in world rankings, with four in the world’s top ten. This excellence is good for the UK and for the world, and must be preserved.
Roy Anderson is Rector of Imperial College London.

Don't like the result? Get over it!

There are those who want to retreat from the conclusions of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, to change the rules of the game, or who yearn for the comfort of the old binary divide. They should take note of Barack Obama’s comment when he took the presidential pen in his left hand for his first public signature and declared: "I am a leftie. Get over it".

The RAE 2008 demonstrated, beyond doubt, that universities with very little research investment in the past could compete with world-leading and high-quality research elsewhere. High quality is everywhere. Let’s celebrate, and get over it, and not rewrite the rules to protect the historically privileged at the expense of others for whom proper recognition, along with public research funding, has been (to borrow another Obama phrase) "a long time coming".

Nor should we fall into the trap of calling for universities to be partitioned into the equivalent of the old grammar, technical and secondary modern school system, with differential funding regimes and pecking orders. It is now even more obvious that no university can claim to lead all of the research agenda, and nor should one.

The Higher Education Funding Council of England’s decision, confirmed last week, to fund excellence wherever it is found, is welcome. The algorithm (7:3:1:0, for allocating funding for 4*:3*:2*:1* activity) remains highly selective but recognises the need to fund world-leading research at all institutions. More puzzling is the decision to limit funding of postgraduate research students to the larger groups. There seems to be no evidence for this. Given the growing shortages of supply of PhDs in many areas, this particular announcement seems perverse and harmful (RF, 4/02/09, p1).

All UK universities are committed to the Bologna Declaration, which confirms that all universities should be centres of teaching, research and knowledge transfer. UK universities should be united in their support of the declaration by backing the distribution of research funding in a way that recognises the excellence that the RAE 2008 has identified.

There is, of course, another good reason why excellence should be funded wherever it has been found. Undergraduate students have a right to expect

research-informed teaching wherever they study. To imply that postgraduate provision should be limited to a few universities pays little regard to reality and to the need for more postgraduate study in many of the newer disciplines and in multidisciplinary areas. It also ignores the fact that countries such as Sweden, Germany and Finland, which are the UK’s key competitors when it comes to innovation, all have a higher percentage of doctoral graduates than the UK.

Both government and funding council have indicated that the new quality-related funding regime, due to be announced on 5 March, will pay some regard to the previous funding of science, technology, engineering and maths. As a chemist, I can see the attractions. However, this argument cannot be pushed too far. There is absolutely no evidence to support funding by critical mass; indeed, the evidence suggests that smaller research units are more productive, and the results of the RAE 2008 confirm this.

Also, large STEM facilities of strategic significance are already funded through the research councils and other initiatives. The ring-fence around STEM could have the obvious consequence of protecting those pre-1992 institutions that have been historically well funded. It also runs the risk of diverting funds away from excellent research in other areas of significance to the economy, including social science, public policy and the many disciplines critical to the creative industries. HEFCE must also consider the impact of the ending of research-capability funding, which has greatly benefitted post-1992 institutions.

But let’s not carp at this stage. After all, 150 institutions had at least 5 per cent of their research activity in one of their submissions classed as ‘world-leading’. No-one can seriously argue that the excellence found in a range of subjects all over the UK should be nurtured and allowed to flourish in only a handful of its universities; research of international excellence has the right to be funded wherever it has been found.

The real proof of the pudding will be in the final allocations, but the days of a closed shop on QR funding should be over. Universities that have demonstrated research excellence, in spite of very little research funding in the past, will want to see a real and significant increase in quality-related public research investment.

Crucially, this would benefit students, whatever course they choose to study and whichever university they choose to attend. They are, after all, one of our most precious assets—the research capital of our future. Let’s not forget them.
Les Ebdon, is vice-chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire, and chairman of Million+, a university think tank to which 28 post-1992 universities subscribe.

Investment must be targeted...

This Research Assessment Exercise may well go out in a blaze of controversy, not because of its methods of assessment, but because of its impact on research funding for the leading UK research universities. Try as they might, the guidelines on funding allocations, released last week by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, still leave much to be desired (RF, 4/02/09, p1).

The RAE is now well established as a measure of the research quality at higher education institutions, and in departments and subjects, which informs existing and potential staff, students, funders and investors. It is also the means for distribution of the major government funding for research through the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s quality-related funding.

Many of our top research universities celebrated success in the results of RAE 2008, but now find that their success is not likely to be rewarded by more funds, or even by level funding, but potentially by a reduction in HEFCE QR funding. Funding models based on multipliers of research quality achieved in RAE 2008, including HEFCE’s newly released model (with its multipliers, 7/3/1/0 for 4*/3*/2*/1*), predict a mismatch between overall quality and funding.

This anomaly applies at both institutional level and for subject areas within institutions. In short, the very best universities, as assessed by HEFCE’s own methodology, may stand still or lose research funding. The problem arises because of HEFCE’s avowed intent to fund excellent research wherever it is found. Small clusters of excellence, in universities that previously had little or no QR income, will thus receive QR funding.

Small clusters that have achieved excellence without major infrastructure or a crowd of excellent colleagues deserve our acclaim. But research funding is about more than rewarding individuals or clusters; it is about optimising the UK’s research capacity and about the UK’s standing globally.

Few could oppose the principle of funding good researchers wherever they are located. But should this be achieved by diluting internationally significant concentrations of excellence that have been built up strategically and painstakingly over the past decade, which place the UK in a leading international position?

HEFCE has many complex models at its disposal to adjust the funding outcomes of the RAE, though most cannot make a major impact on the leading institutions. A higher proportion of funds for certain subjects, such as those in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, as HEFCE’s guidelines propose, will help to maintain funding for the top research universities. It is also justified by the government’s stated desire to invest in science, and will limit losses of our top universities. But what about the thriving subjects in humanities and business studies, and their leading institutions?

The funding model could yet provide some weighting for volume (‘critical mass’) by adjusting funds within each Unit of Assessment for the number of staff returned. This move would, in part, address concerns about the percentage of staff returned to the RAE. An adjustment for volume would provide a double reward for institutions that returned most of their staff, on the individual volume driver and on an additional weighting for volume.

Indeed, this was a key outcome of the major overhaul of the RAE by Gareth Roberts in 2003, but the recommendation was not taken up for the 2008 exercise. Such manipulations may seem contrived, but there is much evidence that concentrations of research excellence, and ‘establishment of critical mass’, have huge benefits for research and research training.

Critical mass is also a strong indicator of sustainability in a subject or institution, allows interdisciplinary research and establishment of significant infrastructure. Such concentrations are reflected in the success of large research-intensive universities in world rankings, in competitive funding at home and abroad, in publications and citations and in the training of young researchers.

We are on a global stage, and if the UK is to compete with the best in the world, investment must be strategically and selectively targeted. The RAE is a UK exercise, but it has a much wider audience. Will this, the last RAE as we know it, be the one that is remembered for depriving our best research institutions of funding and that moved towards a wider distribution of funding across the UK? How sensible is it to dilute the principle of selectivity?

In times of global economic hardship, there is an argument for focusing limited resources in areas of strategic importance. It will be interesting to see how HEFCE addresses these competing pressures and, indeed, how decisions, which might move the UK towards a more even funding model that takes funds from the very best universities, are received globally.
Nancy Rothwell, an MRC research professor, is deputy president and deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Manchester.

...not if you want competitiveness

The promise of the latest (and last) Research Assessment Exercise was clear—to fund research excellence wherever found. The mantra rested easy in the psyche of the elite universities that currently enjoy over 80 per cent of the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s total quality-related funding. Some minor readjustment perhaps, but 2008 would shape up to be a re-run of 2001. The sub-panels would do as required, and peace and harmony would be maintained in the QR universe. Oh dear!

It didn’t take long for the financial shock-waves to start reverberating when, after the dust had settled, it became clear that research submitted to RAE 2008 was ranked as either world-leading (4*) or internationally excellent (3*) in 150 out of 159 UK universities. Concerns were soon heard that, should HEFCE play a straight bat, QR funding would be spread more thinly.

Predictably, many of the ‘elite’, research-intensive universities are worried, claiming that without continued selectivity their ability to compete internationally as world-class universities will be put at risk. There’s faint praise for those lower-ranked institutions that managed to pull some 3* and 4* rabbits out of their hats, followed by a more extensive hyperbole on the inherent dangers in actually rewarding this acknowledged excellence.

Subtle asides hint at processes gone wrong, with over-generous sub-panels delivering inflated grades. What these folk fear is a process akin to osmosis—the diffusion of funds from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration across the semi-permeable membrane that is HEFCE. The scare tactic is to claim loss of competitive edge as the inevitable longer-term smoothing of selectivity drives the system towards a state of thermodynamic mediocrity.

There is of course a certain inevitability to all this. Similar fears emerge whenever special interest groups feel threatened by change. Thankfully, HEFCE’s guidelines on funding allocations, released last week, endorse the council’s early promise (RF, 4/02/09, p1).

It is hardly surprising that the beneficiaries of the Matthew Effect—to those that have shall be given—are fighting to keep their cash. Yet would modest redistribution of funds really do so much harm? Some simple analysis may be instructive.

Take the five leading pre-1992 institutions, chosen on the basis of the proportion of their research activity that RAE 2008 rated as either 4* or 3*: Imperial (74 per cent), Cambridge (71), LSE (69), Oxford (69) and Manchester (64); and the five most-improved, post-1992 universities, chosen on the basis of the rise, since RAE 2001, in the proportion of their research activity that RAE 2008 rated as either 4* or 3*: Hertfordshire (up to 41 per cent), Bournemouth (37), Anglia Ruskin (33), Chichester (26) and Derby (23).

While the average proportion of 4* and 3* activity in the pre-1992 institutions (69 per cent) is a little over twice that in the post-1992 universities (32 per cent), the difference in combined QR funding (£2.36 billion, against £19.89 million) is a factor of 118. Put another way, the listed ‘ex-polys’ managed to drag themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve respectable levels of world class and internationally-rated research on a combined QR income of less than one per cent of that paid to the super elite. Just a little more resource given to the less well off would enhance disproportionately both their research environment and quality of output.

Such value added arguments, casually dismissed at high table and in the senior common room, may raise eyebrows with those untroubled by the politics of university research funding but who pay for most of it—UK taxpayers. Those outside the sector assume universities exist simply to teach. They may however be interested to know why their offspring—of whom the vast majority will never attend the QR elite their parents help fund—should find themselves in large numbers at universities invariably referred to over the past few weeks as "the bottom end" or "also-rans", and denied, through lack of funding, a student experience enriched by research.

No one would want to see a perverse outcome to RAE 2008 that diminished UK global leadership in research. The elite universities will continue to receive the lion’s share. But the argument is strong that some redistribution along quality lines will add to, not subtract from, UK competitiveness. In the UK’s new landscape of research excellence, who can say where step-change innovation, leading to new products, goods or services, will arise.

In this context, it is significant that the Universities of York, Warwick and Essex all feature in the research top 10. Not so long ago, they themselves were new universities. Imagine if the RAE had begun in the late 1960s or early 1970s, and vested interests had clubbed together to exclude them from any future research funding? Starved of resources, where would they be now and what opportunities would have been missed?
Nick Petford is pro vice-chancellor (Research and Enterprise) at Bournemouth University.