EPSRC studentships

I’m somewhat uncertain about how to react to the news that EPSRC is cutting the number of studentships by about 30%. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts you’ll know that I feel that we may be producing too many PhD graduates. This isn’t because I don’t believe that PhDs are useful, it’s because I’m not sure it’s necessary to have as many PhD graduates as we currently have. It’s also because there are, in my opinion, real problems with the academic career structure that is exacerbated by the large number of PhD graduates.

Many who start a PhD do so because they would like to end up doing independent research. The main way to do this is to become an academic in a university. The fraction of PhD students who can, realistically, achieve this is now very small. Some argue that this doesn’t matter because those who don’t become academics go into industry and do very well. This is absolutely fine and I have no problem with someone doing a PhD and then choosing to go into industry. A concern I have, however, is that it can still be very disheartening for those who had hoped for an academic career and didn’t realise how difficult it was to do so. We also have to be careful that we don’t discourage, because of the difficulty of having an academic career, potentially excellent researchers from starting a PhD in the first place.

The other concern I have is that some feel that PhDs should become degrees in which people are taught research skills. I sat through a meeting recently where a concern was expressed that our PhD graduates typically were not competitive internationally. Someone then responded by saying that this didn’t matter as their PhD students were snapped up by industry. That’s great, except that in my opinion a PhD from a top UK university should typically allow that person to compete for research jobs anywhere in the world. They don’t have to do so, but it should allow them to do so if they so choose. If this is no longer then case, then our PhDs are no longer degrees in which students learn to undertake independent, world-class research. I think this is a crucial aspect of a PhD, otherwise we’re wasting everyone’s time.

The solution, in my view, is to expand the number of degrees. If we introduce a research Masters degree, students could learn, in a year or two, very useful research skills that will translate very well into industry. The tops students could then go on to do PhDs and the rest could go out into industry where they could contribute greatly. This would be more cost effective and those going into industry would do so a year or two earlier than they would do if they’d done a PhD and probably with most of the research skills they would need. If the cuts to EPSRC studentships was an attempt to rebalance the system, I might be quite pleased. However, it does seem to be purely a cut because of a reduction in their budget and does not appear to be based on any sense of attempting to produce a sensible system that will address issues relating to the academic career structure without reducing the number of research trained people going into industry. Admittedly EPSRC is a research council and doesn’t have any say in the structure of degrees at UK universities. It’s unfortunate, however, that there doesn’t appear to be any attempt to try and use this as an opportunity to address issues with the degree structure and career structure in UK universities.

EPSRC Fellowships

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) has recently released new guidelines for its fellowships. What is most controversial (in my view at least) is that they have decided to identify – quite specifically – the areas that they will fund. To use their exact words “Under this new fellowship framework, fellowship applications will be invited only in specific research areas that are linked to our strategic priorities”. Those outside those areas (but still in areas covered by EPSRC) are prohibited from applying.

In some respects, something like the above has always happened. The government decides how much money to give to the research councils. This is then divided amongst the different research councils and they then produce strategic plans/roadmaps. Researchers apply for funding by submitting grant applications that are assessed by peers and then by a grants panel. If something doesn’t fit within the strategic plan it could be rejected even if judged to be excellent science. This, however, wouldn’t typically happen since the strategic plan would probably be based on what is currently of interest and something that was not of interest to those reviewing or on the panel would not generally be regarded as excellent.

However, there is always a bit of flexibility. A proposal could really impress the panel and reviewers and be funded even if it doesn’t strictly satisfy the strategic plans. Also, these strategic plans are never particularly specific, which gives some flexibility. Those writing proposals know the general areas that are of interest and then write proposals, in those areas, that they hope will impress reviewers and panel members. The problem I have with EPSRC’s new Fellowship guidelines is that it seems to set, fairly specifically, the areas that can be funded. This must be very disappointing for those in other areas who had hoped to compete for Fellowships. What about PhD students who may now be getting the message that their areas isn’t currently of interest? Also, who decides? I know there were probably panels and committees, but this seems a little unsatisfactory.

It also seems rather unnecessary. Either these are areas of interest, in which case most of those Fellowships funded would have been in these general areas. If not, how did they become the areas that were suddenly important?

I also have a fundamental concern about this type of thing. I probably won’t be able to explain my thoughts as clearly as I would like, but this feels as though researchers are explicitly becoming a resource to be exploited directly. Research councils decide (as the representatives of UK plc) what research needs to be done. They request submission of proposals (tenders) and decide which to accept. Researchers essentially subcontract from their universities to the research councils and carry out the research that has been requested. To a certain extent, the introduction of full economic costing (fEC), in which part of an academic’s salary is directly covered by the research councils, makes it feel like this has already started happening. There is also certainly a push from universities to make this happen (i.e., they need us to cover part of our salary and so we’d better get funded).

The way I’ve always imagined things working is that I’m employed by a university to teach and do research. I decide what research I’d like to do (what do I find interesting). To do this I would typically need some funding, so I write research proposals and try to convince reviewers and grant panels that my work will be interesting. Of course, there is some feedback. I need to do research that could get funded, but my (and others) interest in an area will also influence what a research council might regard as worth funding. Essentially the research is mine (in the sense that I’m deciding what I want to do). I’m not doing research on behalf of a research council who represent UK plc.

What is, of course, important is that the money spent funding research must be beneficial. Exactly what that benefit is could be difficult to measure, but essentially we do need to know that we – as a society – are better off because we fund research than we would be if we didn’t. This, in my opinion, does not mean that every individual research project needs to have some well-defined benefit. It could simply be that if I’m enthusiastic about my research, I will enthuse my students and hence benefit the next generation. It could be that my research will influence something else that will have impact in the future. It could be that I’m solving a problem that is simply interesting to society at the moment, but doesn’t actually have any immediate economic benefit. It could even be that my research will have some direct benefit now. Although predefining the research areas very specifically in advance is not necessarily inconsistent with what I describe, it does seem quite concerning. I hope it’s not the beginning of a slippery slope towards research councils behaving as if they are the customers who decide what research needs to be done with the university researchers being the sub-contractors who carry out the research projects on their behalf. I would certainly find it difficult to get enthusiastic about such a system, and anyway who would be deciding what specific research areas are of interest.

Full Economic Costing : Another cut on the way

If you’ve read any of my earlier posts, you’ll know that I’m not a fan of the Full Economic Costing (fEC) funding model that was recently introduced in the UK. In case you don’t know what this is, it is the way in which research is funded in universities. When a researcher wants money to carry out research, they will apply for funding from one of the research councils and the researcher’s university will include all the costs associated with the research. This will include any salaries (or parts of salaries), admin costs, estates and buildings, travel, computing and a sum referred to as “indirect costs”.

The fundamental problem I have with this is that I think it is not straightforward to separate the costs of teaching and research and that they are both an equally important part of an academic’s career. The risk, in my view, is that we will start to value someone’s ability to bring in money more than the quality of their research and teaching. There will be pressure for research to follow the money and also the possibility that teaching will suffer since the direct link between teaching and money is less obvious. This isn’t to suggest that the amount of money that the universities are getting is not appropriate, but simply that we should have a more holistic view of universities and provide the funding in a more general way (i.e., how much does a research university of a certain size need to cover the basic costs of operating).

However, I do think that some universities may have been interpreting the term Full very specifically and have been including anything that they possibly could onto a research grant. Typically a research grant that proposes to employ a junior researcher, buy some computing, pay some travel costs, and pay some of the Principal Investigator’s (PI) salary will be costed at £150000 per year (with the junior researcher’s salary being about £29000 per year). The university gets almost £50000 per year to cover indirect costs and estates and buildings plus another £15000 or so to cover part of the PI’s salary. I don’t want to suggest that a university wastes this money, but I suspect that it is – in general – more than the actual full cost of a typical research project (or at least more than the full cost that could be easily associate with a typical research grant).

I was listening to Radio 4 yesterday evening and they had – amongst others – David Willetts discussing the science budget. He made the point that even though the science budget will effectively see a 10% cut over the next few years due to inflation, he thought that there could be efficiency savings of order 10%. He highlighted, in particular, the possibility (suggested supposedly in a review by Bill Wakeham – a physicist from Southampton) that in fact universities have been including too many things in fEC research grants. Essentially what he seems to be proposing is that research grants are reduced by about 10% and that all of this will come out of the indirect costs. A consequence of this is presumably that the same amount of money will be going into universities, but more of it will be used to cover the direct cost of research and less to cover the indirect. Universities will therefore effectively see a cut in the money that they use to cover infrastructure and other non-direct research expenses.

My personal view is that universities made a mistake in agreeing to the fEC model. My understanding is that there had been a period when universities were supporting research with money that they felt should have been used to support teaching. I believe the initial idea was that some money would be taken away from universities (the portion that supported research) and returned (with some extra added) through research grants from the funding councils. Universities expected to gain money and hence properly cover all the costs of research and teaching. It is quite possible that the reverse will happen. The research councils could agree that the fEC costs are too high and that there should be some kind of cap on the level of non-direct costs on research grants. Universities could therefore end up back where they started with not enough money to cover the indirect costs of their research activities properly. Personally I wish they’d thought more deeply about the consequences of the fEC model and not simply leapt at the possibility of getting more money.

Budget deficit

I listened – last night – to the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee session with David Willetts. In general I was impressed, both with those on the committee and with David Willetts himself. Phil Willis (the ex Chairman of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee) was a member of the committee and he was, as usual, well informed and articulate. He asked a very interesting question about why we are planning to cut research budgets while many other countries (Germany, France, Spain, Japan, China, USA) are ring-fencing or increasing their research budgets. He also pointed out that our total public debt is comparable to or less than that of many of these countries. David Willetts’s response was that the problem is not necessarily the total debt, it’s our current deficit – the amount we need to borrow in order to cover the difference between expenditure and receipts. This is illustrated in the figure below that I have taken from the treasury website. It shows total public sector spending (blue bars) and total public sector spending (yellow bars). The deficit is the difference between these two values.

As can be seen in the above figure, there was actually a surplus in the late 1990s. In about 2001 we started running a budget deficit, but it remained at less than 3% of GDP until 2007-2008 when it suddenly ballooned to about 10% of GDP. This is a big number and does mean that we are borrowing a large amount of money at the moment. This is what confuses me though. If the economy recovers, then the deficit should return to 2007-2008 levels within a couple (maybe a few) years. If we were to do nothing, we would need to borrow a large amount of money and although this may make the city a little nervous, it’s hard to see how the economy itself would suffer. People would remain in employment, education and healthcare would still be well funded, and research budgets would not need to be slashed. What is more, the small print on the above figure says that the public sector spending is the “Total managed expenditure, including the temporary effects of financial interventions.” Maybe I don’t know what this means, but I assume it means that one of the reasons for the large deficit is that we’ve been bailing out the banking sector. If right, we’re facing massive cuts entirely because we’ve had to bail out the banking sectors who already are making profits of billions of pounds a year.

This again seems to indicate that the deficit should reduce, fairly quickly. Again, I understand that our debt will grow if we don’t cut it quickly. Currently we pay 43 billion in interest on our debt. If we increased our debt by one-third, we would be paying about 60 billion a year. It is a lot of money and I’m all in favour of reducing our deficit and, over time, reducing our debt. Given that our deficit is likely to return to pre-financial crisis levels of about 3% of GDP, a reduction of about 9% in public spending (given that public spending makes up about one-third of our economy) could remove the structural deficit and – in the short term – essentially cover the interest payments. What is more, a modest increase in taxation together with a modest reduction in public spending could produce the same result without the carnage that the proposed cuts are likely to produce.

My gut feeling is that this is largely idealogical. It is an opportunity for an essentially conservative government to reduce the size of the public sector. Today’s proposal that students fees could be uncapped and could double in the next year or so, seems to be first step in this direction. Furthermore, it is very difficult to see how removing this amount of money from our economy on such a short timescale won’t do some damage. I accept that not cutting the budget will result in an increase in public debt, but at least we could be reasonably confident that the economy should continue to recover. A goal to cut an amount comparable to the 2007-2008 deficit so that within a few years we’re running a balanced budget and can work towards reducing our debt would seem to be a much more sensible option. It’s quite possible that I misunderstand this competely and I’m pretty sure some people will think this to be the case (probably fairly safe from actually being attacked for this as not many people are reading this). Essentially my view is that we are facing ideologically driven cuts that are justified on the basis of a large deficit resulting from us bailing out the banking sector. If we can convince the right people that cuts of this magnitude are suicide, maybe we can also convince them that cutting the science budget will also do much more damage than good.

Science budget cuts

I’ve signed the Science is Vital petition and clearly agree with the view that if the cuts are of the magnitude that people expect, the damage done to UK science could be extreme and irreversible. I’m, however, finding it quite difficult to really get behind this fight, largely because I’m not particularly comfortable with what this argument implies. The government wants to cut the total public budget by something like 10-20%. Their reason for doing this is that they want to reduce the structural deficit, essentially the amount of money the government has to borrow, annually, to balance its books even when the economy is performing optimally.

Although I do believe that cutting the science budget would be disastrous, if one assumes that the cuts are inevitable and we don’t want the science budget to be cut, what gets cut in its place. As far as I’m aware, health and education (although not Higher Education) are ring-fenced. Ultimately, reducing (or getting rid of entirely) the structural deficit is a perfectly sensible thing to do. We can’t expect to simply borrow money indefinitely. However, trying to do so on the timescale proposed by the government may be the problem. Admittedly, annual borrowing is currently something like 10% of GDP, so we are increasing our debt by a substantial amount every year. However, our total debt is still not particularly large. It is similar to, if not smaller than, many other comparable countries.

Allowing the debt to grow for the next few years is not obviously the wrong thing to do. Although slashing public sector budgets may also not be obviously wrong from an economic perspective, it will clearly have a very serious effect on some sectors of our society and if we can’t protect the most vulnerable in our society, then we have some very questionable ethical standards. What is more, I suspect that the impact of the proposed cuts will be very hard to predict. When scientists try to understand the evolution of a system, a very common approach is to perform a linear analysis. If you assume the perturbation is small, the equations often become analytically solvable. If, however, the perturbations are large the system becomes non-linear and understanding its evolution becomes very difficult. Computer models can deal with such systems, but predictions based on the simple linear analysis become largely useless.

Strictly speaking the cuts aren’t effectively non-linear, but the consequences of such a large perturbation must be virtually impossible to predict with any accuracy. I certainly feel that cuts of this magnitude will be damaging for the country as a whole and that even if we can protect the science budget, the damage done to some other sectors of our society may make protecting the science budget all a little pointless. I think we, as academics, should be making strong arguments as to why cuts of this magnitude are too unpredictable to be worth considering. Growing our debt in a managed way and aiming to reduce the structural deficit over a longer time period will be much safer and result in more long term stability. Included in this are decisions about the size of the public sector and how to get the required revenue, but this will be much easier to do if the economy is reasonably stable than if it is highly perturbed and uncertain.

Common sense?

Don’t know who wrote this letter to the Guardian a few days ago, but it does make a very good point. It’s along the lines of what I was discussing in an earlier post, although put somewhat more eloquently than I could manage.

Although I certainly wouldn’t be necessarily advocating turning back the clock, trying to simplify the system does seems quite reasonable. A few years ago, one of the things I really liked about working in the UK, when compared with the US, was that money wasn’t a major issue. I don’t mean that money wasn’t important, but simply that Academic researchers weren’t under a great deal of pressure to bring in money. They would still need money to carry out their research, but because the research money primarily covered direct costs, as long as someone was productive the amount of money they brought in didn’t really matter.

With the introduction of Full Economic Costing (fEC) this is all changing. Even a basic grant brings in a lot of money to the university, some of which covers the Principal Investigator’s salary. I think this is a very negative step and could well change the motivation of some researchers and become very divisive if a two-tier system develops – those with money and those without. One of the reasons why I think the UK has punched above it’s weight internationally in the recent past is precisely because academics were relatively free to pursue what they enjoyed, rather than being pressurised to do what is most likely to bring in money.

I certainly think that the system would be much simpler if universities were given enough money to operate, probably determined by the number of students and the quality of research (as determined by the Research Assessment Excercise). Researchers would then apply for funding to cover the direct costs of their research (plus some basic overheads). Together with being simpler, this would be a much more positive environment in which the UK could continue to punch well above its weight.

Insulating Cable

I haven’t written any posts for quite some time.  I did start quite a few, but always seemed to lose momentum rather quickly.  I have, however, noticed that the number of people looking at my page has increased slightly (from almost nothing to a few, to be honest) in the last day or so and wondered if those who visited were expecting some comment on Vince Cable’s recent speech.

I  should be annoyed by his speech, but really can’t bring myself to be too worked up about it.  It seems to be a typical example of a simplistic sense of how we should fund research.  John Butterworth’s Life and Physics Blog (that I’ve only just noticed is being hosted by the Guardian) illustrates this wonderfully well with a post called Conducting Cable.

I will, however, make one comment about the speech and how it can misrepresent things. Vince Cable mentions that only 54% of UK research was assessed (by RAE2008) to be “world leading” or “internationally excellent” and therefore that 45% was not excellent and should therefore not be funded. At first glance, this seems reasonable. However, the way RAE2008 worked was that all researchers who were included in the submission had to submit their 4 “best” papers published (or at least in press – I think) since 2001. These papers, together with other measures of esteem, were assessed, not the individual researchers. An individual researcher could have – for example – one paper that’s regarded as “world leading”, two that are regarded as “internationally excellent” and one that is ranked as “internationally recognised” or “nationally recognised” (i.e., not excellent). The 54% therefore essentially refers to the percentage of papers (or more accurately, research activity) submitted that were regarded as excellent, not the percentage of researchers or indeed of research projects (I’m being slightly simplistic as other factors were also included in the assessment). It is, therefore, possible that more than 54% of research projects funded lead to a paper that is regarded as “world-leading” but also result in a number of papers that don’t have much impact. Maybe we shouldn’t publish as much as we do, but maybe this is just a consequence of trying to build towards something that will have lots of impact and be “world leading”.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that, in principle, the idea of only funding excellence is reasonable. The reality, however, is that trying to identify excellence is difficult and there are pockets of excellence everywhere and a large fraction of researchers probably do some amount of excellent research. As it is, the current success rate for STFC grants is probably worse than 1 in 5 so (if grants last 3 years) less than 60% of researchers are funded at any one time. With the coming cuts, it could easily end up being more like in 1 in 10, with only 30% of researchers funded at any one time. Hard to believe that only 30% of researchers deserve funding. Will have to wait and see – maybe it won’t be as bad as we fear.

Ada Lovelace Day

Today is apparently Ada Lovelace day, a day when bloggers are meant to draw attention to the achievements of women in science and technology. Although I am aware of many women who have done and still do contribute greatly to science and technology, I had – embarrassingly – never heard of Ada Lovelace.  It turns out she lived from 1815 to 1852 and was one of the world’s first computer programmers, working with Charles Babbage on his mechanical computer.

The idea behind Ada Lovelace day is for bloggers to “tell the world about these unsung heroines”, but I wasn’t really sure how to do this. I probably don’t know enough about any scientist (man or woman) to really do them justice in this blog. What I thought I would do instead was to write something that would at least support what I think is the goal of Ada Lovelace day : to highlight – even today – how underrepresented women are in some areas of science and technology. Certainly in most physics departments – or at least in the ones of which I’m aware – the fraction of permanent posts taken up by women is small. In mine, it’s something like 10% and none of the women in my department are yet professors, although this is largely because most of the women in my department are early to mid-career and aren’t yet in a position to really expect a promotion to professor. I would, however, expect this to change some time in the not too distant future.

A simple interpretation of why women are so underrepresented in physics departments today is that in the past they were clearly disadvantaged in some way, either directly or indirectly, and it will take some time to redress the balance. It takes something like 30 years to change completely the personnel in a department and so assuming that 50% of all future hires are women, it will take about 30 years before physics departments have an equal representation of men and women.

It is, however, somewhat more complicated than this. Even in PhD programmes, there is still not an equal number of men and women. In most physics departments something like 30% of the PhD students are women. This is clearly not ideal, but is probably an improvement on the recent past and means that we should expect at least 30% of academic hires in the near future to be women. However, when one looks at the make-up of research staff (i.e., non-permanent) in Physics departments today, the fraction of women in these post is often less than 20%. This is slightly concerning because most research staff have been hired recently and so why the fraction of women in these research posts is significantly less than the fraction of women in PhD positions suggests something is wrong. If a smaller fraction of women, compared to men, choose to continue with their academic careers, this implies that we won’t improve the current 1 in 10 ratio anytime soon.

The fact that the ratio of women to men in research positions decreases as you move through the different career stages is well documented and is often referred to as the “leaky pipe” syndrome. There are probably a number of reasons for this but, I believe, that we are now in a position where the ratio of women to men on a research job shortlist is similar to the ration of women to men who apply for the job. I also believe that the number of women hired into academic jobs is consistent with these ratios. This suggests that there is no obvious bias in the hiring and selection processes today. Presumably something is discouraging many women from continuing their academic/research careers. I don’t know what this is (or even that my interpretation is necessarily correct) but I do think we should do all we can to reverse this.

There is absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t be striving to have diverse and balanced physics departments. If there is something about academic careers that particularly discourages women compared to men then we should try to work out what this is and do something about it. Maybe it is seen as too competitive and aggressive. Maybe the methods we use to determine quality disadvantage women compared to men, although I think all would benefit from a more balanced – and less simplistic – view of what it takes to be a good academic and researcher. An organisation that is trying to help is Athena SWAN. They do this by encouraging universities and university departments to have responsible working practices that don’t disadvantage women or, in fact, anyone who has, for example, family responsibilities.

I don’t really know how to increase the ratio of women to men in physics departments, but I do think we should strive to do so. It is in no one’s interest to have a system that disadvantages one group of people compared to another. We should be aiming to give everyone (men or women) an equal chance to contribute to science and technology, now and in the future. We can continue to have an Ada Lovelace day that highlights the contribution of women to science and technology prior to the 21st century, but I would like to think that at some point in the near future men and women will be contributing equally and we won’t need to have a day that particularly highlights one group’s contribution.

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.

Restructuring the STFC

The Department for Business, Innovations and Skills (BIS) has announced the new arrangements for the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which is the result of Paul Drayson’s review of STFC. This has been reported in a number of places already, including the BBC, the Times Online and has already been covered in various blogs such as the telescoper, Leaves on the Line, and The S word.

I haven’t been particularly complimentary about Paul Drayson in my earlier posts but, to be fair, the result of his review seems quite reasonable. The basic idea seems to be that BIS “expects to continue to provide STFC with a level of protection similar to that which has been provided this year and last in respect of the additional costs of international subscriptions due to exchange rate changes.” The intention is also that there will be better long-term planning of the costs of running and operating large facilities. Basically, they will attempt to protect the grants line from being completely overrun by exchange rate fluctuations and unexpected increases in the cost of running large facilities. All in all, quite sensible and a lot of credit must go to the various blogs (mainly the telescoper, the eAstronomer, and Living in the Real World), who have regularly been highlighting the issues, and to people like Paul Crowther and Brian Cox, who have been very vocal about the various issues with the structure of STFC and the importance of Physics in our society and economy.

I don’t really need to say much more about the details as they have been covered extensively by others. One of the reasons I wanted to write a post was to add my voice to the others who, although supportive of the suggested changes, feel that fixing the structure may not really be enough. A lot of damage has already been done to our ability to carry out world class research in Physics and Astronomy. I believe that a strong Physics research base is crucial to the country’s ability to sustain world class universities and to support an economy that relies more and more heavily on science and technology. Simply protecting grant funding at the current level is not going to ensure that we are able to maintain a world class research base in Physics and Astronomy.

I also think there is a real problem with the current STFC senior management, or at least with certain individuals. There are some exceptions but, by and large, the community seems to no longer have any confidence in the people who are running STFC. I also don’t quite understand why the government still has any confidence in the senior management. Right from the moment STFC was formed, numerous people have been highlighting issues with the structure of STFC. I have followed the STFC crisis pretty much from day one and at no time did any member of the senior STFC management acknowledge that there were any problems. What is more, they didn’t even seem to acknowledge that any real damage was being done to Physics and Astronomy research in the UK. If anything, the message from STFC management was that there were too many Physicists and Astronomers and that cutting back would be a good thing. How can anyone have confidence in a management team that not only doesn’t recognise structural problems with the organisation they are running (despite these problems being pointed out at regularly intervals) but doesn’t even seem to value what they are explicitly meant to be supporting. In fairness, the problem may well lie with one or two individuals rather than with the team as a whole, but some major changes in this team would also seem to be required if we really are to have an organisation that can effectively support world class research in Physics and Astronomy.