UK University Vice-Chancellors and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown Still Butting Heads. (January 30, 2007)

    The Guardian's Jessica Shepherd finds that "[d]isagreements over research are straining the relationship between the Treasury and universities".

Professor Roger Brown, vice-chancellor of Southampton Solent University has a way with words, "We are spending a lot of time and energy wiping egg off Gordon Brown's face when we should be kicking his face in."

And if you've surmised that its about the reinventing of the UK's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), you've got it in one.

The Chancellor's proposals to replace the costly and time consuming peer review system of submitted published research with a system using metrics based on income earned from contracts and grants, the number of postgraduate students, and the number of times research is cited by other academics met, uncharacteristically, with almost universal opposition from vice-chancellors.

Mr Brown backtracked from his original suggestion that the 2008 RAE, work on which had neared completion, be scrapped and scheduled the new approach to take place following the completion of RAE 2008. Funding bodies will use the results of RAE 2008 to calculate funding allocations for research beginning 2009-2010. The starting date for implementation of the next RAE has not been fixed.

"Relations between the Treasury and universities are still at a low point, despite the fact that RAE 2008 is staying," Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, told Ms Shepherd. "Many in the sector feel they - and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in particular - are being overly generous in trying to get the Treasury off the hook it created for itself with its ill-considered proposals for post-RAE 2008."

But there appears to be real anger in UK academe, certainly in the research intensive universities. They see a Treasury bias towards "applied" research - that is, research that solves immediate problems - rather than curiosity-driven, "blue-skies" research.

Drummond Bone, vice-chancellor of Liverpool University and the president of Universities UK, the umbrella group representing vice-chancellors, puts it this way: "The Treasury is very concerned with applied research. It has taken precedence over blue-skies research. I don't think the Treasury understands that it can be very hard to distinguish between the two. Take the pharmaceutical industry: we have no idea whether what we are doing in terms of research will be the latest discovery. It could very quickly become applied research, although it might have started as blue-skies research. We need to be careful that the complex dynamics of university research are taken into consideration. It's important to remember that applied and other research is actually interwoven. I'd say our real tension with the Treasury is to say: don't get hung up on applied research."
 

In addition the universities are becoming increasingly suspicious that "Treasury is also widening the rift between arts and humanities professors and their science, technology, engineering and medicine (STRM) counterparts".

Professor Bone says: "I think there is likely to be a greater rift between the STEM and non-STEM subjects, and it is not intellectual sense. So-called non-STEM subjects will be downgraded. We also need to be careful that the distinction between STEM and non-STEM isn't oversimplified. A lot of research sits on the fence between arts, for example, and computer science."

Professor Steve Smith, vice-chancellor of the University of Exeter and chair of the 1994 group of small research-intensive universities, told Ms Shepherd that while STEM subjects do need an extra push when it comes to funding in order for Britain to remain competitive, this should not be at the cost of non-STEM subjects.

According to Professor Smith, "One of our worries is that the core funding will go to STEM subjects. If you are in the Treasury, you have to be pretty sophisticated to see the advantage of non-STEM subjects. The temptation must be to push money into STEM."

Finally, there is the suspicion abroad that Treasury wants to micromanage the sector, and while there is agreement within the sector that it has been given a lot of money by the government. In 1997, the science budget was £1.3bn, and by 2008 it will have more than doubled, and Treasury will also be providing £60m for universities to do research with business from next spring, "But they are quite unwise to think they know better about how to organise and spend universities' money than universities do. The Treasury appears to want to manage and control in ever more detail what universities do," says director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, Bekhradnia.

On the other hand Professor Smith cautions, "It is like a relationship where the couple has been together a very long time; we shouldn't overstate these tensions."

But having followed the performance of John Howard's Coalition government over the past decade and more particularly its obdurate behaviour as regards the Research Quality Framework, British academe has a right to be leery.