Do the heads of the research councils think the oompa loompas do it?

Sometimes, to someone working as a researcher in a University, it can appear that those who have designed and run the system haven't actually set foot in a University for many decades. One aggrieved researcher writes in the Guardian about how most of the people who do research aren't actually included in the RAE assessment.

One line, where he complains that a potential PI said that they liked an idea of his for a project, but that he wouldn't get a post if it was funded, rings true. I've been involved in a number of applications where a referee has complained that our choice of a PhD student and a postdoc to do most of the work is a "missed opportunity" for more training - i.e. that a postdoc doesn't need research opportunities, only creating more PhD students matters. Not that there's a direct route from PhD student to lecturer - instead there's the slough of postdoc.

Sum them up together - there is the strong impression of a view that postdocs do nothing worth considering. PhD students are here to be trained, PIs are here to create research. That we're the ones who do the research a lot of the time is irrelevant - research and publications cannot even be considered in an RAE if a permanent staff member isn't attached to it.

A very good postdoc I've worked with for a number of years has just had her final day today. She has fled into industry (and one that is fairly credit-crunch proof as well). Arguably, she hasn't fled research - she's escaped academia to be able to continue as a scientific researcher. If she'd stayed in academia, she'd have had to become a lecturer - paid to lecture, judged on research, but actually doing bureaucracy first, teaching second, and no time to actually do any research yourself. But you can hire someone else to do it for you.

Don't forget your prime purpose

Any large organisation will develop a large support infrastructure. This has its dangers. For example, the central bureaucracy can start running things for the benefit of the central bureaucracy - the accountants are on tap, rather than on top. For an organisation that can't go broke - e.g. a university - this puts in a danger of forgetting that the main purpose is to educate and to research. If the educators and researchers are put second best to image and publicity, short term gain will become long term pain. I can sometimes be heard grumbling about a lab that has single glazing rather than my desired double glazing because changing the window during the refurbishment would have "changed the external appearance of the building". I don't see this as a reason not to go ahead - the purpose of the building is to do research. The central authorities did - presumably this is an image and appearance thing, ahead of research efficiency (and energy efficiency - there is a breeze in my office (similarly benighted with single glazing) with the window closed. How much energy is wasted heating this room?)

Reading the NY Times, there are much larger illustrations of this - the US Ivy Leage university, Rutgers, has spent millions trying to become a major power in college American Football.

Now, it is not that Rutgers American football team has a large budget that is the problem. If this budget was raised from the gate receipts of people who want to watch the team, and from TV revenues for broadcasting the team, then I would have no problem with them spending this money on the team, even if that results in the team coach earning more than the professors (although how many professors would swap their tenure for the instability of a sports team manager?). This money has come from the sports fans, and so can be spent on giving the sports fans what they want. I don't see it as a necessity that income from this should be taken away and given to research any more than income from filming soap operas should be taken away and given to cancer research, except via standard taxation.

It is not even that they're spending money on something other than pure teaching and research - extra mural activities are an important part of many a students time at universities, and many employers look very favourably at the appearance of a sports team on a graduate's CV as a demonstration of commitment and team work. It is that this is *all* about image, and not about education. How much more education does the average player get on a college American football that has a winning record? How much more benefit could that money do in keeping tuition fees down, budgets up, even in supporting a much larger number of students in less high-income sports (e.g. rowing, swimming, athletics) or student theatre, music, art etc?

This can't be defended as education of rounded students. It is because someone in a big office has decided they want to see Rutgers name up in the top flight of college football. But he has forgotten what a college is for.

Too many academics?

A letter in today's Nature magazine suggests one solution to th ecurrent UK grant funding problem - less academics.

universities currently have the freedom to over-staff and are rewarded for doing so under the present system.

Uh... really? Are we really over-staffed (uh.. I mean in the teaching and research positions, not the central facilities)? If so... who are the buggers who aren't doing anything, and why can't we get them to take on the surplus work of those who are working overtime to raise funds, do research, write courses, mark, etc. etc. etc.?

To me, it would appear that problem would be not that there are too many academics, but that there are too many members of staff at universities who are meant to justify their existence by research activity when they actually have to spend much of their time teaching. A greater acceptance and acknowledgement of the role teaching has in universities is perhaps required.

Money where your mouth is

Nice to see some people value education - I mean really, really value education.

Cambridge colleges do like their alumni. They're not, on average, as generous as Ivy League alumni are in the US, but they do tend to supply a fair chunk of money. New Hall College, part of the University of Cambridge, are particularly delighted with one of their old girls, though. Ros Smith, after graduating, began working with an IT consultant called Steve Edwards. They later married and set up a company that is now a world leader in telecom billings systems, Geneva Technology. Smart people. They sold out in 2001 (see what I mean by smart people?) and although their shares, assuming they held onto them, will have taken a dive since, the Times estimated their net wealth as 70 million pounds.

Well, make that 40 million. They've just given 30 million pounds to Ros' old college. As "New Hall" was the name of the college while it waited for a donor, this is a big enough gift to rename the college. In this case Murray Edwards College - Murray being the late Dame Rosemary Murray, who originally founded the college in the 1950s.

Save our Science. Again.

This sort of thing seems to come up with depressing monotony. The Institute of Physics has issued a plea to the Science and Technology Facilities Council not to introduce cuts until Professor Bill Wakeham review of Physics is reported to the government.

The STFC is short of 80 million. In comparison, the Northern Rock building society has had to have a loan of £26bn because - well, frankly they were too greedy and didn't worry if things went wrong because the government would have to bail them out.

Looking at the Hansard report on the discussion on Tuesday in the House of Commons on STFC funding, I find some interesting quotes:

The important point... is that the STFC has been telling Ministers about the problem since July

Although it looks as though the research councils have had a cash uplift, they are in fact spending not new money, but old money that was going towards research costs

As far as I am aware, every physics community in every university is affected by these cuts.

Three As and a Facebook account

Oh, shock horror. A Cambridge University admissions tutor has admitted to looking at prospective students facebook public accounts.

The University says it relies on "interview performance, academic record and personal statement, outlining their interests and reasons for studying a particular course."

But someone can be nervous at their interview, or overstate their interests in a personal statement. Or they could be very, very dull and do nothing but work (while I like to think of City boys as being very, very dull, nowadays they like to recruit people who get firsts while, say, captaining the rowing club).

Perhaps the tutor doesn't really want a bunch of dry, grey, faceless academic clones who can do nothing but work, because if you pick that you'd get a bunch of nervous breakdowns long before the finals. I suspect the tutor isn't using this as an excuse to deny people, but as a clue that someone should really be let in.

Who has the best universities?

Which country has the most universities in the top 5 in the world? Well, the US isn't it, surely, given the size of the country and the amount of money their universities have in endowments.

Apparently, no. It's the UK, thanks to Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College London. If you believe the Times Higher Education Supplement, anyway (or at least, the BBC News story about it, as I can't find the actual list on the THES website, so no idea where my employers are yet).

The US still has the top establishment (Harvard) and 6 of the top ten to the UK's four.

Managers vs Academics

THES has an article on a leaked draft document from Birmingham University (not my employers, I work for another UK university) which shows rather a management obsessed viewpoint -

The (Birmingham University University and College Union) branch calculates that while the words "manager" and "management" appear 119 times in the document, "researcher" appears five times, and "teaching" appears six times. The word "academic" appears twice after its removal from the list of threats.

Yes, that's threat. Academics were apparently perceived as a threat to the strategic goals as defined by managers. The document goes on to detail the pay rewards for hitting targets (not that hitting targets equals a good job, as has been shown in many cases in the past, but it's easier to judge).

If I had to name a major threat to my university, I'd say "target-driven management schemes" were the worst - not that we have much say in the matter, given how the government allocates the money.*

Which reminds me, I must try and wring one more paper out of the desiccated remains of a not-so-recent research project. Once I hit the target, I can get on with something more scientific.

*I don't view managers as a threat, as trying to manage academics and researchers has got to be a thankless task, but some of the modern management trends definitely are unhelpful.

BSc in mumbo-jumbo

Complaints again at what the new universities are giving degrees for.

Nature have an article (subscription required) on subjects regarded by many scientists as pseudo-science being taught as BSc courses.

The BBC have picked up on the story, and quote Prof. Colquhoun of University College London for his dislike of these courses:

He said the teaching of complementary medicine under a science banner was worse than "Mickey Mouse" degrees in golf management and baking that have sprung up in recent years as "they do what it says on the label".

The good Prof is using the freedom of information act to find out what these courses are actually teaching.

There may be an argument for keeping these degrees to one extent - as with the management of golf courses and the knowledge needed for running a large scale bakery, these are work-related levels of knowledge required to run businesses that bring in a significant amount of money - someone needs to do this sort of training, and because John Major got all classless about them being regarded as less rigorous than University degrees, his lot decided to make all the places that used to teach that sort of thing universities as well.

So arguably, if there is a market in something (and there certainly is a market in people wanting mumbo-jumbo to make them feel good), then in a purely business sense people should be trained to exploit this market, and since universities are expected to fund themselves, they should be free to offer courses in exploiting people's gullibility.

But then that's business, not science.

Boris on Universities

Boris Johnson in the Grauniad doing the modern-day touchy-feely hug-a-hoodie Cameroonian Conservative thing regarding Universities and funding - say very nice things about us, hint that they'd like to do very nice things for us, suggest it would be good if other people did nice things for us, but above all don't promise anything (and openly admit as such, since everyone knows that's what he'd do anyway).

Comments on the general thing - a promise to stop carping on about "mickey mouse" courses is a good thing. After all, you can't sit there demanding the universities cater for the free market and then promptly kick up a fuss when they cater to the free market. Besides, the vast majority of mickey mouse courses are from the old polytechnics who shouldn't have been turned into Universities in the first place, and left to do good work in the field of niche training courses (such as surfing studies, golf course management, etc - there's a lot of money in the leisure industry after all)

The top US universities have done quite remarkable things with their endowments. Only Oxford and Cambridge have endowments of any size at all compared to the average US university (indeed, only those two from all of Europe would figure). I rather suspect if the stupendously well rewarded Goldman Sachs brokers did decide to chuck their money at the universities rather than on expensive frivolities (or the retreat in the south of France that they can run away to after their 19th nervous breakdown) then it'll pretty much go to those two anyway.

Smashing the jam jars - well, science is a medium to long term process. If smashing the jam jars then means a bout of politically motivated merry go rounds with the money then it will indeed be a bad thing, as a project could have the cash pulled out from under it part way through. On the other hand, I think one could suggest that there could be better co-operation between certain funding bodies without scaring the horses (or stating anything that wasn't blatantly obvious).

Sale of assets - grief, surely Labour have sold everything that wasn't bolted down, then unbolted things to sell them, then sold the bolts.

And finally:

I still think the main point of a university education is to achieve a personal intellectual transformation

Does this include dressing up in fancy clothes and getting pissed, I wonder?