Hi, Lisa.

Thanks for this blog post and for inviting me to comment. Despite my deep concerns about the corporatisation/marketisation of academia, I find myself agreeing with much of your post. Some of the key questions, as I see them, are:

Should the government expect to see socioeconomic impact from the research it funds?

Of course. But defining and quantifying that impact is not only problematic, it can be impossible. A study commissioned by the Treasury in 2000 to examine the economic return on basic research came to the conclusion that attempting to quantify the return on government investment is effectively a fool’s game. [Salter and Martin, Research Policy (2000)]. And despite the cries of protestation from the research councils and HEFCE, Mandelson et al. are almost exclusively interested in direct economic return (spin-offs, IPR, patents, licensing…).

Should universities and industry interact so that promising ideas with commercial potential are developed as quickly as possible?

Yes, but with important privisos regarding the nature of that interaction. What the government and, disappointingly, the research councils and HEFCE don’t apparently understand is that there is (or should be) an immense difference between the ethos of publicly funded research and the IPR culture of industry.

I didn’t become an academic to protect data from my (publicly-funded) experiments. A publicly-funded university scientist should be in the business of disseminating their results as widely as possible. (On a slightly tangential point, it’s reprehensible that Jones et al. at UEA have done so much damage to the credibility of university scientists (across all disciplines) by their secretive and unethical approach to climate science data.)

I recommend reading Jennifer Washburn’s “The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education” and D.S. Greenberg’s “Science for Sale” to get an insight into the ethical and logistical difficulties that arise when corportations and industry drive the research agenda in universities.

Is the taxpayer clamouring for greater short-term economic impact from the research they fund?

I don’t share your opinion that the general taxpayer is only concerned with the technological advances that arise from scientific research. Instead, I would argue that a substantial fraction of the tax-paying public is interested in what I might loosely term science for science’s sake. To list just a few examples, look at the remarkable success of Brian Cox’s “Wonders of the Solar System”; the intense public interest in the LHC; and the continued fascination with the Hubble space telescope and the search for exoplanets.

And, in any case, I’m a taxpayer! I do not see why my taxes should go to support the R&D programmes of, for example, Procter & Gamble, BAE Systems, BP etc…, at the expense of funding basic research in universities. Not only do many of these corporations have very dodgy ethical records (particularly when it comes to the “transparency” of their R&D programmes) but why should the taxpayer subsidise the likes of BAE when the company spends a significant amount of time and effort avoiding its fair share of taxes.

The drive towards market-led academic research and HE in general is not being driven by the tax-payer/the electorate. It’s being driven by government. These are now unfortunately two very different driving mechanisms! The damage that New Labour has inflicted on primary and secondary education in the UK – due to its flawed committment to impose market principles on the “delivery” of what are public goods – is now being inflicted on the HE (and FE) sectors.

Why aren’t more academics politically active?

You’re entirely correct to suggest that academics should be more politically savvy. The key difficulty, however, is this. As a scientist, I address a problem by (i) marshalling evidence; (ii) considering that evidence as even-handedly and rationally as possible (sometimes difficult, I’ll admit!); and (iii) building my (counter-)arguments on the strength of the evidence.

However, this is not how politics works. When I first started considering how funding in the UK was being distorted by near-market drivers a few years ago, I was immensely naive about this gulf between the scientific method and politics. In politics, ideology (and lobbying by those who are aligned with that ideology) is everything.

I could point to the Nutt drug debacle, where independent scientific advice was rejected because the government didn’t like it, but a better example is New Labour’s wholesale rejection of the authoritative Cambrige Review of Primary Education last year. This was a four-hundred-and-fifty page report, informed by detailed analysis and thousands of pieces of evidence. The government response? “No, we don’t like this. Let’s ignore it. (But not before we get our spin doctors to slag it off to the press on the basis of flaws we invented).”

Any scientist will find this rejection of evidence in favour of what might be a very flawed political ideology very, very disconcerting. I certainly wouldn’t want to get involved in politics for precisely this reason.

All the best,

Philip

I guess that I should clarify one of the points made in the preceding comment. When I say “despite the cries of protestation from the research councils and HEFCE” , I don’t mean that the research councils and HEFCE are protesting against the drive towards near-market research and applied science. If only that were the case! Instead, I mean that RCUK/HEFCE protest that what they want to fund is, in fact, a balance of near-market and blue skies research and that both societal and economic impact are important.

Words are cheap, however. What matters are the strategies and funding/assessment schemes implemented by the councils. These are clearly increasingly biased towards near-market research.

Best wishes,

Philip