Research Universities and Today's World. (April 18, 2013)

The Group of Eight has just released a discussion paper The role and importance of research intensive universities in the contemporary world. Its ten page closely argued turgid prose will make its non-reading by those of influence a near certainty. Which doesn't make it any less important for the future intellectual, economic and physical prosperity of Australia and its citizenry.

A short excerpt.

[M]any universities are operating in a funding environment that requires them to become more responsive to the immediate needs of business or society, a situation exacerbated by the growing cost of research and an increased reluctance of all funding bodies to pay the full costs of the research they commission. In seeking financial support from a broader range of sources, universities are becoming under pressure to produce short-term practical outcomes, to commercialise their intellectual property, to focus on producing IP that it will be possible to commercialise, and to chase funding, no matter what the implications of winning it. Issues of research ethics and probity have become even more important as potential conflicts of interest arise; but the position of research universities is that while it is possible to purchase their research services, you cannot buy particular results – these will arise naturally and inevitably from the research.

Unfortunately, the reasoning behind this focus on the immediate is simplistic, building on a narrative that does not recognise the complex ways in which innovation takes place or acknowledge the deeper and more profound contributions which universities are making. Taken to its extreme, this approach could prevent universities from making their really significant, fundamental contributions to economic, social and cultural development or environmental sustainability; and ultimately lead to more fragile and less resilient societies. Universities are not simple tools of social engineering or drivers of economic growth although their influence is essential for sustained social and economic development.

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And here follow a couple of excerpts from Denis Noble's* column in the April 17, 2013 issue of Nature.

It was not an auspicious start. Galvanized by the seriously diminishing value of the science budget, we recruited British Nobel prizewinners, more than 100 fellows of the Royal Society and nearly 1,500 scientists, each of whom paid £20 (US$30) for a half-page advertisement in The Times to launch Save British Science on 13 January 1986.

[T]he 1980s were the years of the ‘unfunded alpha’, a nice turn of phrase that let someone know that his or her peers had thought their project deserved to be funded but that there just wasn’t sufficient money available. In retrospect, it is clear that this was inevitable. With the huge and rapid expansion of higher education, science funding was always going to struggle to keep up with the inventiveness and quality of the UK science base.

[Our]most serious [mistake] was to accept (as did later governments as well) too much of the Thatcher government’s agenda: to make science justify itself by its economic impact. Of course, both basic and applied research have important, and often unexpected, economic impacts. As Thatcher herself admitted in a 1988 speech to the Royal Society, the “value of Faraday's work today must be higher than the capitalization of all the shares on the Stock Exchange!” But the economic impact of research is far from its only value. At Save British Science, we always tried to balance the economic argument with the case for sheer intellectual curiosity and innovative achievement. The latter was often drowned out by the impact of the former, however.

Although the Blair government did much to restore funding levels, it nevertheless continued some of the Thatcher government’s demand for economic impact. UK scientists now live with the baleful consequences: reductive scrutiny in the form of the Research Assessment Exercise and its successor, the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

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*Professor Denis Noble is co-director of computational physiology at the University of Oxford, UK. He co-founded the lobby group Save British Science, which in 2005 changed its name to the Campaign for Science and Engineering.