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.
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