Scidebate

I listened to most of the Science debate, a couple of days ago, between Adam Afriyie, Evan Harris and Paul Drayson. Couldn’t quite listen to it all because my daughter decided to be diligent and practice her guitar and insisted on me helping. The debate was pretty good, but it hasn’t really done much to change my view of the different parties. I find Adam Afriyie unconvincing and insincere. He also insists on stating things like the UK has the highest deficit and the worst debt, none of which is strictly true (as far as I can tell). I know our economy isn’t in good shape, but when I look at the data it doesn’t look much worse then Germany, for example, and seems better than the US. It appears as though the conservatives are going to continue to insist that the UK economy is in dire straits, that it is all Labour’s fault and that there is therefore no chance of extra investment in anything (or conversely, they are unable to suggest that extra investment might be possible because this would imply that the economy isn’t quite as bad as they want it to appear and therefore Labour hasn’t done as bad a job as they would like us to think).

I’m still not particularly impressed with Paul Drayson. Part of this is clearly because I don’t like a system in which people can become part of government by being made Lords. However, I do think that he is really listening to what he is being told and is trying to reach some kind of consensus. He has recognised problems with the structure of STFC and has come up with what appears to be a reasonable solution (although no reversal of the cuts to the grants line). He did, however, say something a little odd. He made the comment that the £600 million cut to HE funding and science funding is a cut on an as yet undefined budget and therefore doesn’t necessarily mean a reduction in funding. I guess that if the message gets through in time, the HE and science budgets could be set at a level such that a £600 million cut can be included without a reduction in the budget and without anyone losing face. Still seems rather odd to announce a cut but then suggest that this doesn’t necessarily imply a reduction in the budget (although it was Peter Mandelsson who announced the cut, not Paul Drayson).

Paul Drayson also went through his arguments for the inclusion of impact statements in grant applications. One was that evidence is needed to help make the case for doing research. I happen to agree with this. I just don’t see how academics writing statements about how their research “might” have impact qualifies as evidence. There must be a way to get evidence that is more concrete than this . The other argument he made was that it is taxpayers money and therefore there is an obligation to convince the public that it is well spent. Again, I agree with this in principle. However, there is a subtlety to this that I think Paul Drayson doesn’t get (or choses not to get). Many people in the UK are in careers that rely on public funding, but we don’t necessarily expect individuals within these different areas to justify their existence. We – the public – realise the value of, for example, healthcare, education, social services, etc. The fact that he wants us as individual researchers to justify what we do implies – in my view – that in some sense research is viewed as some kind of luxury and that we are in some way privileged. Make no mistake, I do feel very lucky and privileged to get paid to do a job I enjoy and that brings me much satisfication. I just don’t believe that research is a luxury. It is a crucial part of our economy and is a primary reason why we have world class universities and graduates that can subsequently contribute significantly to our economy. Of course at some level we do have to justify how public money is spent and how much should be spent. But, like other publically funded areas, I just feel that it should be done in a much broader way. Holistic rather than reductionist. It is the science minister and the heads of funding councils who should be making the case to treasury, not individual researchers. What we as researchers and academics have to do – in my view – is to do our teaching and research to the best of our abilities, which then makes it easier for these people to make the case for HE and science funding. This is what we (or certainly me) were hired to do.

Evan Harris was, once again, fantastic. He even managed to keep his comedy (which is actually pretty funny) at what seemed like a perfectly reasonable level this time. He seems to really understand the value of universities and of university research and he makes clear and coherent arguments about how we should fund these organisations and the role of science in society. In fairness, maybe it is easier to make these kind of idealistic arguments if you’re never likely to become science minister and never have to deal with more of the realities of the job, but he makes them extremely well nonetheless. He also seems to be the only person making the argument that research funding plays a crucial role in ensuring that we have world class universities that can attract world class academics. He also seems to realise that to attract world class academics into university and research jobs, we are going to have to make sure that the career prospects are attractive. Academics and researchers are a resource but not an infinite one, and the more pressure we place on these people and the more we imply that their role is not of obvious value, the less likely we are to attract people into such careers. He also seems to recognise the issue of gender imbalance in academia and that it is not a simple problem. For some reason, women are less likely to remain in academic or research jobs and we need to do something to reverse this trend.

All in all, I’m very pleased that science is a becoming an important election issue, but concerned that the two main parties are not making a convincing case that they genuinely believe in the value of science and scientific research. I would really like to see Evan Harris playing a bigger role in making science policy, so would be quite comfortable with a hung parliament. Adam Afriyie, on the other hand, seems to think a hung parliament would be a disaster which suggests – to me at least – that what is driving the Tories is a desire to be in power, rather than a desire to play a role in developing policy that would be of benefit to the UK and its people.

HE funding

Interesting speech by Phil Willis about Higher Education (HE) funding that makes a number of very valid points about how the current funding situation is likely to influence the HE sector and, in particular, those who are currently applying for places at HE institutions.

Although he has openly criticised the Russell Group universities’ take on the recent funding cuts for being somewhat over the top, he does feel that this is not the right time to be cutting funding to Higher Education. I probably agree that using scare tactics – especially ones that are probably not demonstrably true – is not going to convince the government to reverse the proposed funding cuts, even if this decision does verge on the insane. I do also agree that now is not the time to reduce funding for Higher Education.

What is of more immediate concern is the real possibility that, despite the increase in the number of applications for university places, Russell Group universities are likely to reduce the number of places that they fill. There seems to be two reasons for this decision. One is that universities generally have a quota that sets a limit on how many places they can fill. There is currently a threat that English universities will be fined £3500 for every student over this quota. The quota essentially reflects a maximum amount of money that a university can expect to receive. If this maximum also reflects a real limit on the number of places that can reasonably be accommodated, then a fine may also make sense. It’s not fair on students if there aren’t sufficient resources for them all to get the support that they need to perform well during their degree. On the other hand, there is probably some flexibility in most programmes. Fining universities for going a few percent over quota probably achieves nothing (and effectively reduces the available resources) and the threat of such a fine probably means that universities would rather reject potentially good students than go slightly over quota.

The other reason for this reduction in places this coming year is also probably because the actual quota is not on a single year, but a total over the first 2 or 3 years. Many universities over-recruited last year, probably as a result of the financial crisis and people choosing to go to university rather than look for a job (One reason for this over-recruitment is that universities use data from previous years to work out how many students will accept their offers. To fill 100 places universities may make offers to 800 applicants. The current financial crisis means that data from previous years is not really valid and so guessing how many offers to make is very difficult). Many universities are therefore worried that if someone notices that they are coping with more students than their quota allows, their quota may be increased without a corresponding increase in funding. Balancing their overall quota by under-recruiting this coming year (and maybe next year) may make some sense, but it does mean that students who would have been accepted last year and would be accepted in future years, will be excluded to match what might be a somewhat artificial quota. It is probably also largely correct that under-recruitment this year won’t really make up – in resource terms – for the over-recruitment last year. Students in different years generally don’t sit in the same lecture theatres and don’t use the same laboratory space. It would seem reasonable for universities to argue for an exception during what are clearly exceptional times.

Something that Phil Willis’s speech highlighted is that although there is a quota for local students (essentially UK and EU) there isn’t a quota for foreign students who pay their own fees. The under recruitment this coming year probably means that universities can fill what will essentially be spare places by making more offers to foreign students (assuming they can attract them). Having foreign students in our universities is, in my view, generally a good thing. They tend to be quite good students so have a positive effect on those around them, and they bring extra money into the HE sector (and in return hopefully get a valuable degree). However, the more foreign students in our universities, the fewer local students we can accept. Under-recruiting local students this year and effectively freeing up places that can be filled by foreign students seems wrong to me, especially if those being excluded would have been accepted in the recent past and would be accepted in the near future.

What is more, there must be some value associated with our graduates. It has been argued that Physics, for example, underpins something like 6% (~ £100 billion) of the UK economy. If we graduate 3000 Physics students a year each of whom work for 30 years, there will be something like 100000 Physics graduates in the UK economy at any one time. One could then argue that each graduate underpins about £1 million. This is clearly an oversimplification and increasing the number of Physics graduates isn’t going increase the UK economy by £1 million per graduate. Foreign students also, of course, bring new money into the UK, which is clearly a good thing. However, reducing the number of local physics graduates could, however, have a very detrimental effect on the economy since there must be some minimum needed to sustain this part of the economy. There must be a point at which increasing the number of foreign students – at the expense of local students – could damage the UK economy. The same must be true in other areas and reducing the intake of local students, particularly in the sciences, at a time when we need to stimulate the economy seems like a potentially damaging decision. It feels like another short-sighted decisions that will appear to save money in the short term (although even this may not be true) but potentially cost us in the long term.

I think I understand why universities are doing this. It may even be true that during these difficult financial times, predicting how many students will accept offers is very difficult. Over-recruiting again could be very damaging if we don’t have the resources to accommodate all the incoming students and so under-recruiting may well the sensible option. I do, however, feel that we will be disadvantaging students who won’t get a university place simply because of the year they finish school. Although I don’t necessarily think the current situation will lead to a sudden change in the ratio of foreign to local students, I do think we have to be very careful about the balance between foreign and local students. Foreign students do bring money into the UK economy now (in exchange for a good degree), but local students contribute to the economy for the rest of their lives. We have to make sure that we get this balance right.

As an aside, I believe that Phil Willis is not intending on standing again at the next election which is, I think, a great shame. From what I’ve seen, he’s been a very good chairman of the Science and Technology committee and I find his views very sensible and well informed. He also seems to be well regarded and has some influence. It is possible that his criticism of the cuts to research and HE funding could have some impact. I hope that we get a few more equally sensible MPs after the upcoming election.

CaSE Science Debate

I watched and listened – last night – to the Science and Engineering Policy Debate between Adam Afriyie (Shadow Science and Innovation Minister), Paul Drayson (the current Minister for Science and Innovation) and Evan Harris (the Liberal Democrat science spokesman).  The debate was organised by the Campaign for Science and Engineering (CaSE) and was chaired by Roger Highfiled, the editor of New Scientist.  I was a bit disappointed as I was rather selfishly hoping that the STFC situation would be discussed in more detail and that there would be more discussion about including the assessment of “impact” in future funding decisions.   Both of these were covered, but only briefly, and the debate was explicitly steered towards more of a discussion about future science policy, rather than a discussion of existing issues, and each candidate was pushed to give their partys’s views on various topics.  This was okay, but it did mean that a broad range of topics were covered and that nothing was really covered in any detail.  The three speakers were all extremely polite and complimentary about each other, so nothing particularly exciting happened.  Adam Afriyie even commented that Paul Drayson was a good Science Minister who was probably in the wrong party. As good as Paul Drayons may or may not be, I’m somewhat disturbed by the fact that the he is unelected, and the fact that one can qualify to be a government minister by being made a Lord seems somewhat archaic and undemocratic.  The same is true for Peter Mandelson and the less said about that the better.

Overall I thought Adam Afriyie was a little benign.  Didn’t say anything that I particularly liked or disliked.  Paul Drayson was disappointing.  I quite like the fact that he’s on Twitter and that he seems to be trying to listen to others and to actually take on board what they are saying, but whenever I listen to him I get the impression that he really doesn’t get the subtleties of scientific research.  He also seems to be spouting more and more of the standard party rhetoric and had to be pushed to use the word “cuts” rather than “efficiency savings”.  He still regurgitates the rather simplistic arguments about why including impact statements is a good thing and that it won’t have a negative impact on fundamental research.  He also stated that the government needs to fund more applied research in order to help the economy as if this was obvious and didn’t really merit much discussion.  I don’t have a problem with applied research at all, but nothing the government does now regarding research funding (apart from possibly using a Keynesian approach and increasing it) is going to fix the current recession, so increasing funding for applied research to help the economy now is almost certainly not going to work.   Another issue I have with increasing the amount of government funding for applied research is that it could further discourage industry (which in my view is where a lot of applied research should take place) from investing in research.  The government should really be putting more pressure on industry to take more risks, not spending taxpayers money on research that will be of short or medium term benefit to industry.  As decent as I think Paul Drayon is trying to be, I personally don’t think he’s a particularly good Science Minister and I’m not particularly confident about the outcome of his review of STFC that is due to be completed by the end of February (although I am at least pleased that he has recognised that there is a problem).

Evan Harris, on the other hand, was fantastic.  He was very well informed and a lot of comments were hard-hitting and direct.  He was also hilarious.  Maybe he shouldn’t try quite as hard to be funny, but he is pretty good at it.  Could almost be a comedian.  I was really impressed by how he performed and by what he presented as the Liberal Democrats’s views about how science should be funded and what kind of role it should play in society.  I particularly liked his argument that politicians who misuse data and statistics should be hammered for doing so.  I’m really hoping that the Liberal Democrats do well in the upcoming elections, but am not particularly hopeful.  The media seems to largely write them off as having no hope and I’m not quite sure why this is.  I’m starting to suspect that the various media outlets are too strongly tied to individual political parties and as a result the different parties are not getting objectively represented (I may be saying something patently obvious here).  I suspect the fact that the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to form the next government gives them the freedom to say what they like and to make promises that they might never have to keep, but I’m not sure we should hold that against them and I’m quite prepared at this stage to take them at face value.  Labour and the Conversatives have proven that when they’re in government they can’t keep their promises, so maybe it’s time to give the Liberal Democrats their chance.  Really can’t be any worse, can it?

Science funding after the next election

While following the #stfc comments on twitter, I noticed that someone made a comment along the lines of “who’ll vote for the Labour party now”. To a certain extent, I agree. I certainly have no desire to see Labour win the next election. They have ultimately managed to do immense damage to some very productive areas of British science, and the UK doesn’t appear to be a better place to live now than it was before Labour came to power in 1997 (as an aside, my father – who left the UK many years ago – commented, when visiting recently, that politicians used to say “continue to serve” but now shamelessly say “remain in power”).

Something that concerns me, however, is the impression I have that many people’s automatic alternative to Labour is the Conservatives. The reasoning seems to be that the only other possible party is the Liberal Democrats, but they’ve never been in power and so the Conservatives are the only viable alternative. This really doesn’t make sense to me. As far as I’m aware the pre-1997 Conservative government was at least as bad as the current Labour government, if not worse. We surely cannot want the next government to contain any of those who were involved in the pre-1997 Conservative government (I’m referring here to ministers rather than backbench MPs). Admittedly I suspect very few – if any – of the current Conservative shadow ministers were in the pre-1997 cabinet, in which case they have as much experience as any of the Liberal Democrat shadow ministers. Therefore why is there a general assumption that the Conservatives are capable of running the next government, while the Liberal Democrats are not. It’s true I guess that there are currently more Conservative MPs than Liberal Democrat MPs, but all (or at least most) of those who would actually be in the next cabinet are probably currently experienced MPs.

As far as current performance is concerned, I think the Liberal Democrats have been quite impressive. Vince Cable seemed to have a good handle on the financial crisis well before either Alistair Darling or George Osborne. Evan Harris, the Liberal Democrat Science Minister, seemed to perform quite well in an event discussing the future of UK science, certainly better than the Conservative Shadow Minister Adam Afriyie (there’ll be another debate in late January). Phil Willis has also, in my view, been a very good Chairman of the Science and Technology Committee (what used to be known as the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills). In fact, it was their report on STFC that prompted me to write this post. Maybe I’m biased, but the report seemed remarkably honest and straightforward and pretty much confirmed what many people had been saying. In particular, it essentially confirmed that a primary issue is that STFC was not formed with sufficient funding to maintain current programmes, saying

We remain concerned that the former PPARC community has been saddled with a £75 million (at 2006/07 prices) funding deficit derived from CCLRC to meet the additional running costs of Diamond and ISIS TS2, despite assurances from the Government that STFC would be formed without any legacy issues. We conclude that the combined budget of PPARC and CCLRC was never going to be sufficient for STFC to manage Diamond, ISIS TS2, the other large facilities and all the PPARC research programmes. This was noted by the National Audit Office in January 2007, and therefore the Government should have known and should have acted upon it. The fact that it did not has had unfortunate consequences. We believe that the Government should ensure that its original commitment to leave no legacy funding issues from the previous Councils is honoured.

Somewhat surprisingly, for what is essentially a government report and might normally be expected to be somewhat restrained, it was also very critical of the way in which STFC was being run, stating explicitly

Substantial and urgent changes are now needed in the way in which the Council is run in order to restore confidence and to give it the leadership it desperately needs and has so far failed properly to receive. This raises serious questions about the role and performance of the Chief Executive, especially his ability to retain the confidence of the scientific community as well as to carry through the necessary changes outlined here.

Of course, some changes have been made, but I suspect many would argue that these changes weren’t sufficient. The Science Minister – Paul Drayson – has now agreed in a recent press release that there are problems with the structure of STFC and intends to find a solution within a few months. My suspicion is that a solution to the structural problems will be found (even one that we may be happy with), but no real attempt will be made to resolve the legacy funding issues.

I guess this post started with a discussion of which party may end up forming the next government and has ended up back with a discussion of STFC. Let me finish by saying that I’m not arguing that everyone should choose the Liberal Democrats, rather than the Conservatives, as an alternative to Labour, or even that people shouldn’t vote Labour. I don’t belong to the Liberal Democrat Party and, in fact, am not a fan of party politics – I think the Three Line Whip is completely undemocratic. I am, however, worried that we’ll end up with a Conservative government primarily to punish Labour, rather than because everyone who voted for the Conservatives believes in their policies (maybe I’m not giving the general British public enough credit though). I also think that, as far as science funding is concerned, a future Conservative government may result in us harking back to the good old days of Labour. In truth, since party politics is here to stay I would actually rather we had three strong parties, than two parties who seem to be essentially the same as each other, or at least very similar. I might even be happy with a hung parliament. They can spend more time booing and hissing at each other in Westminster and less time messing about with things more to suit their political goals than to really make things work more effectively.