Kafkarna continues: REF gloves off at Lancaster University

I thought I would reblog this. Partly because I haven’t had a chance to write much recently and it gives me an opportunity to keep things ticking over, partly because it seems like something worth highlighting (although given my readership, this may not help much), and partly because I’ve written about the REF (and been quite critical) and this type of activity is one of the things that I expected to happen and illustrates the issues – in my opinion – with this type of assessment process. I particularly like, and agree with, this comment in the post Whatever this charade is, it is not a framework for research excellence and so I recommend giving this a good read.

coasts of bohemia

Two days ago an open letter from Professor Paolo Palladino, former Head of the History Department at Lancaster University, appeared on the university’s internal History Staff list serve, with copies sent to senior administrators in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) and Central Administration.  I responded the next day with a post supporting Professor Palladino’s position, sent to the same recipients. With Paolo’s permission, I am reproducing both of our letters here.  We both believe that the issues raised by Lancaster’s selective culling of research-active staff from submission in the 2014 REF–a practice in which it is not alone among British universities–deserve the widest possible public debate.  We would therefore urge anyone who shares our concerns to share this post through social media.

Professor Palladino’s letter:

Dear all,

Over the next few days, a number of colleagues across the university are to be informed that they will not…

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The Bottom Line

Apologies to the few of you who actually read my blog. I’ve been rather ignoring it lately. Anyway, I came across a youtube video recently that I thought I would post here. I initially saw it here. It might have a bit more hyperbole than I would normally use myself, but I thought it quite compelling.

One of the reasons I found it interesting is that I was recently at a meeting where I met and spoke with another physicist who was working (in academia) as a financial modeller. It was an interesting conversation, but what struck me was that they appeared to think only in terms of the stability of the market. The idea being – I think – is that if the market is stable and optimal, then that is best for the economy. The issue that I could see is that there was no obvious link between the market and the real economy on which it was based. Or rather, there seemed to be nothing in the modelling that essentially said, this market is associated with an economy that ideally should be providing employment, products and services for a particular country. Maybe I’m wrong about this and maybe there are good reason why they do model the markets in this way. It does seem as though, typically, we do ignore many important things when deciding on the value of our markets, which is essentially the case being made in the video below.

REF, QR funding and the science budget

I guess we should all be reasonably pleased that the science budget has remained ring-fenced. The reality, of course, is that this just means that it is ring-fenced in a flat-cash sense, not in an inflation adjusted sense. As scientists, maybe we should make sure they define the term more specifically in future. It does appear that the current definition would allow the government to claim that something has been ring-fenced, despite the spending power tending to zero. Logically, you mighty expect it to be defined in terms of spending power rather than pounds, but that would require deciding between RPI and CPI, and that is clearly for too difficult.

Anyway, enough cynicism. In truth, we should probably be grateful that the outcome hasn’t been worse. It certainly has been for some and I do feel that the current government has got its basic economic policies completely wrong. It seems like it’s time that someone explained to George Osborne that it’s not necessarily the size of the debt and deficit that matters. What matters is their size relative to the size of our economy. The way its going now it seems like he’s getting it wrong on both counts.

What is maybe more concerning, from a science funding perspective, is the possibility that the government may choose to axe the QR funding. This is the funding stream that comes from the Higher Education Funding Councils and how it is distributed is determined via the outcome of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise. Now, it may well be part of the ring fence and it may well be safe, but I wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry if it were cut. If you’ve read some of my earlier posts, you’ll know that I’ve been very critical of REF. This is both due to the manner in which it is implemented and due to the shenanigans taking place at UK universities; the potentially risking hiring, the morally/legally questionable redundancies, and the time and effort spent preparing for what is – in my opinion – a completely flawed exercise.

So, if it were to be cut, part of me would feel like saying “serves us right for taking something so silly so seriously, and for playing the kind of games that have not and will not benefit our fundamental role as teachers and researchers”. On the other hand, it is a lot of money (£1.5 billion I believe) and I certainly have no desire to see this money leave the Higher Education sector. As far as I can tell, some may struggle to survive as they are, even if there are no cuts to the QR funding. Well, I certainly hope that it isn’t cut but I also hope that in future, universities will find the backbone to tell the government that playing these kind of games is silly and that they should find a simpler and more effective mechanism for distributing this money (although I don’t think it should simply be given to the research councils, but that might be a topic for another post).

Mark Steel at the People’s Assembly

There is a new “organisation” called the People’s Assembly which is, essentially, a movement against austerity. I’ve been rather lax in my reading (at least semi-political reading) and blogging recently and so don’t really know much about it. I do, however, think that austerity has been a disaster, both socially and economically, and so – if I understand the motivation behind this movement correctly – I agree with it wholeheartedly.

What I thought I would do is include, below, the speech given by Mark Steel at the People’s Assembly meeting yesterday. It’s both quite amusing and quite fiery. Something that I won’t expand on much here (but is something I may try and write about at a later stage) is why it appears that the most effective rhetoric for those on the left appears to come from comedians, while the most effective rhetoric on the right appears to come from what, I’ll politely call, firebrands. I’m don’t really understand why there is such a difference in style between the right and the left, but it is something I find of great interest. Anyway, enjoy the video.

Wage stagnation and the financial crisis

There was a very interesting and well-written article that I read a little while ago about wage stagnation, rising profits and the financial crisis. I can’t seem to find it again, so if any else knows the one, maybe they could point it out to me. It was about the US, rather than the UK. The basic narrative was that the increasing influence of neo-liberalism and the reduction in union power (and collective bargaining) meant that corporations were (from the 1980s onwards) keeping more of their profits than they had in the past. So, basically profits were increasing as a fraction of GDP while wages were dropping as a fraction of GDP.

So business owners, shareholders and investors now have more capital than they’ve had in the past. Of course they want to do something with this capital which, presumably, they will invest in the financial sector. Their consumers (who are also their employees), however, have less disposable income than they’ve had in the past. So what happens? Well, the financial industry sees all these people who could use more credit and who might like to buy houses. Sub-prime mortgages come into existence and credit becomes easier. People buy their houses and spend their credit on the very products made by the companies who’s profits are rising as a fraction of GDP. These people are, however, also the employees of these companies and their wages are dropping as a fraction of GDP.

So, at this stage corporations are winning on multiple levels. They’re keeping more of their profits than they have in the past (by not increasing wages at the same rate). They’re continuing to sell their products because of the easy credit that this extra capital allows, so they’re able to maintain their revenue streams and continue to extract their profits. Since this credit is essentially their money in the first place, they’re also earning interest on the money being lent to their own employees.

However, there’s a fundamental problem. If people’s wages aren’t rising while their debts are, there’s every likelihood that many won’t be able to repay their debts. Hence the credit crunch arrives when this starts to happen and the financial sector finally realises that the risk associated with the sub-prime mortgages and easy credit is much greater than they had initially realised.

Now, I appreciate that this applies to the US, but I recently saw an article on the Liberal Conspiracy website about wages and profits in the UK. It discusses essentially the same trend, which is illustrated in the figure below which I’ve taken from the article on their site. It’s certainly my view that we should be aiming to reverse this trend if we want to reduce the problems we currently have in our economy and possibly also in our society.

Graph showing the variation in wages and profits (net and gross) since 1960 (credit : Duncan Weldon, Liberal Conspiracy).

Hiatus

I want to apologise to both of my readers for not posting much recently. I’ve been rather distracted by other activities which I won’t discuss here. Nothing serious, I’m just busy and don’t really have time to post here. I’ve also not even been reading much of the Guardian recently, which is unusual for me. I’m not sure when I will get back to posting more regularly. I may just need to get sufficiently riled up about something relevant to get me going again. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The intelligent management of the public finances

This is a topic that I have very interesting. It did seem obvious that trying to simply slash public spending may end up being counterproductive. This post seems to confirm that general view, but I’ll need to read it a bit more carefully to make sure I understand what it is saying and to get a sense of where the number are coming from.

The Uxbridge Graduate

Background

Much discussion has surrounded the contention that high public debt levels are associated with low / no economic growth. Specifically,well-publicised research has suggested that if the public debt to GDP ratio exceeds 90% then economic growth will slow down markedly and perhaps come to a standstill. The British government  has eagerly accepted this finding and has used it to justify its debt reduction strategy, which is that cuts to public spending are necessary if the economy is to return to growth. The government has hence proceeded to cut public spending on the promise that the cuts will reduce borrowing and thereby generate economic growth. However, instead of economic growth, the government’s cuts to public spending have coincided with stagnation and recession.  I suspect this is because the spending reductions have been indiscriminate.

The following sets out my view on why indiscriminate cuts to public spending will often increase the…

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The elephant in the room with Lewandowsky

I haven’t been posting much lately as I’ve been busy with other things. I have, however, recently come across this article about the work of Stephan Lewandowsky. He is a cognitive scientist in the School of Experimental Psychology at the University of Bristol. He has published a couple of papers about why some people seem to reject (deny?) many of the findings of climate science. The post that I’m reblogging is reporting on a couple of his papers and suggesting that there is a link between having a libertarian (free-market) ideology and rejecting climate science. If you’ve read any of my other posts, you’ll know I have real issues with the basic tenets of free-market thinking and with those who reject climate science, so this post certainly gels with my thinking and it is interesting that it is based on published work in cognitive science. Doesn’t make it right, I guess, but I would recommend giving it a read.

Declaration on Research Assessment

Just thought I would highlight the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. It’s been a long day and I’m quite tired, so I don’t want to say too much. You can read most of this yourself, but basically a group of editors and publishers of scholarly journals met during the Annual Meeting of The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), and have come up with a set of recommendations about the use of journal-based metrics. The basic motivation was

the need to eliminate the use of journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, in funding, appointment, and promotion considerations;

the need to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research is published; and

the need to capitalize on the opportunities provided by online publication (such as relaxing unnecessary limits on the number of words, figures, and references in articles, and exploring new indicators of significance and impact).

A lot of it seemed to focus on the use of Journal Impact factors when assessing individual bits of research (which, as many have already pointed out, is horribly flawed) but there was indication that this was attempting to go further than just that. Citation metrics can be useful but can also be problematic. There can be a huge range of different practices even with the same basic area and so using them alone to assess an individual can disadvantage some potentially excellent researchers. It can also be advantageous to some who aren’t particularly good but who just happen to work in an area that is currently popular and in which papers are collecting citations easily.

Anyway, this is an encouraging step and I hope it has some impact and that it’s taken seriously by funding agencies, interview panels and promotion boards. I suspect it’s too late to have much effect on the REF2014 panels, but maybe there’s hope for REF2021.

The role of universities!

I haven’t had much chance to write posts recently, although I don’t have much of a following so I suspect not many have actually noticed. I’ve been quite busy with some other things and am also trying to write a talk for a conference next week. My recent post about the integrity of universities did, however, generate a little bit of interest. If you’re interested in that topic can I recommend that you read some of the posts on Richard Hall’s Space. He has a lot of interesting posts about the role of universities and their place in society. The only real criticism I have of his posts is that they are written in a manner that requires quite a lot of concentration. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but does mean that I find them quite difficult to understand when I’m perusing them in the evenings after a long day at work.