¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ

This month the Further and Higher Education Bill will begin the final
stage of its passage through Parliament. The bill has attracted heavy fire
from universities for a clause which they fear will limit academic freedom.
But both universities and government have been almost silent about another
change that is potentially far more important: a radical reform of the way
research in British universities is funded.

The government is making this change not in a bill subject to parliamentary
scrutiny and debate, but in a series of quiet alterations to the arcane
formula used to determine the money allocated to each university forresearch.
The universities are seriously worried by the changes, but they are failing
to comment on the issue because they are divided between those who hope
to gain and those who fear that they will lose.

The funding reforms will end the system of research funding that has
served Britain for decades. Critics say the consequences will be dire. They
fear that within a few years, thousands of lecturers in the universities
that lose out in these changes will find themselves effectively barred from
research. But the greatest fear is that the new arrangement will deplete
the numbers of Britain’s researchers – severely and permanently.

One focus of the alarm has been the possibility of a two-tier system
of universities, with only a select few able to afford research in all their
departments, and some unable to support research at all. It is a prospect
which has already opened up deep divisions between scientists. Some, such
as Mark Richmond, chairman of the Science and Engineering Research Council,
see a two-tier system as both inevitable and desirable, given the limited
resources provided by the government. ‘If we cannot afford . . . adequate
support across the whole of science, and in all the universities, we must
ensure it thrives in a limited number of research areas, in good departments,
in some universities,’ he said last year. Others, including Michael Atiyah,
president of the Royal Society, believe dividing teaching from research
is courting disaster. ‘We have got to the stage where the accountants are
in charge. It is corrupting the system,’ he said last December.

University research has traditionally been financed through two channels:
universities provide every academic with the basic funding for research,
while research councils, industry and charities grant money for specific
projects. But times are changing, and two new factors in particular have
persuaded the government that the dual-support system is unsustainable as
it stands.

First, the division between universities and polytechnics is about to
be dissolved. Starting next year, English universities and polytechnics
will be funded through a single council, and the same will go for Scotland
and Wales. Under existing rules the polytechnics – which now educate 54
per cent of undergraduates – would then have taken up to half the research
funds. This, the government feared, would dilute funding to researchers,
most of whom are in universities, and weaken British science.

Secondly, in Richmond’s words, ‘university research is gradually being
starved out of existence’. The real cost of scientific research rises all
the time, but while the research councils’ budgets have grown by over 20
per cent in the last 10 years, university research budgets have remained
stagnant. Universities have struggled to balance the conflicting claims
of research and teaching, and their difficulties can only increase as they
strive to meet the government target of doubling the number of undergraduates
they teach by the end of the century.

In response, the Government last year proposed a new policy of selective
funding designed to concentrate money in departments that produce top-quality
research. The formula that will be used to allocate research funds for the
coming academic year will exclude most polytechnic departments, and will
transfer resources from weak university departments to strong ones.

One consequence might be the emergence of two tiers of universities.
But the alterations to the funding system could bring changes to the conduct
of research in Britain that have received far less publicity. What happens,
for example, to a bright researcher in a department that does not attract
financial support for research? At present, the dual-support system would
guarantee each researcher something, if only a certain amount of time free
from teaching. Under the new system a good idea in the wrong place – a university
that only teaches, for example – could easily be wasted. Equally, it is
difficult to see how innovative research groups can build departments from
scratch if funding is concentrated in departments that are already successful.
There is also some doubt whether there is any need to concentrate resources
in cheap subjects such as mathematics.

At present, the Universities Funding Council supplies government money
to universities in separate pools for teaching and research. The research
budget for the year 1991-92 stands at £680 million and the formula
used to divide it between universities has four components: staff research
(SR in academic jargon), direct research (DR), judgemental research (JR)
and contract research (CR). The formula is applied rigorously by department
and the resulting sum handed over each year to the university.

The four components are calculated in a way that has ensured that the
main factor affecting the amount of money for each department is the number
of students taught there. In consequence, funding has corresponded crudely
to the number of staff in each department, giving every university teacher
some money and time for research, through facilities such as libraries,
administration and technical support.

The government is making three key changes to the funding formula. First,
the £110 million of direct research, which is allocated to universities
nominally to pay for overheads associated with grants from Britain’s five
research councils, is being transferred to the councils themselves. Instead
of being given to a university, which then has the freedom to decide how
to allocate the money, it will go only to the scientists who win research
council grants.

Secondly, the balance between money allocated for judgemental research
and staff research will change. JR, which is allocated on the basis of the
UFC’s assessment of the quality of a department’s research, is to be increased
at the expense of SR, allocated in direct proportion to student numbers.
Last year JR was worth £307 million and SR £248 million, but
the government has said that by 1995 it wants the ratio of JR to SR to be
2:1, corresponding to a transfer of £63 million away from the allocation
based on student numbers. This will benefit top-rated departments at the
expense of the rest.

Thirdly, the way JR is calculated will change. The quality of departmental
research is now judged on the basis of a funding review, carried out in
1989 by the UFC. At the moment a department that rates the maximum five
‘stars’ for research gets five times as much as a one-star department with
the same number of students. If the one-star de-partment has five times
as many students, the two departments receive the same amount. In future,
student numbers will be replaced in the calculation by some objective measure
of research output, possibly the department’s income from commercial contracts.
And the rating of the quality of research will come from a UFC review in
progress. Again, successful departments will benefit.

The cumulative effect of these changes, starting next year, will be
to make the main determinant of UFC research funding the council’s assessment
of the quality of research in each department. This is the move that is
expected slowly to squeeze research out of many university departments.

Universities at opposite ends of the research quality scale are pursuing
different strategies to cope with this change. The University of Wales and
most other low-scoring universities are trying to attract more undergraduates
as quickly as possible to win extra funds for teaching. Imperial College
of Science, Technology and Medicine, part of the University of London, is
taking a different tack and is increasing the number of graduate students
it is admitting, while holding steady its undergraduate numbers. This will
make it more like a US-style research-based graduate school. University
College London is following a similar strategy.

The emerging pattern reflects proposals put forward in 1986 by the Advisory
Board for the Research Councils (ABRC) in a plan entitled A Strategy for
the Science Base. This document called for a system divided between research
universities, teaching universities and mixed universities. Its proposals
were rejected by government at the time and recently, Kenneth Clarke, the
Secretary of State for Education and Science told the Times Higher Education
Supplement that he hopes that ‘the bulk of English higher education will
continue to be given by people who combine teaching with research’.

Research squeeze

But others see this hope as unrealistic. Brian Flowers, chairman of
the Lords science and technology committee, said last month: ‘There will
be no formal division of institutions into research institutions and teaching
institutions; it is just that research will be effectively squeezed out
of many of them – not overnight to be sure, but in the course of time –
by the inexorable pressure of funding criteria and the rising cost of research.’
Flowers, head of the Science Research Council in the early 70s, added: ‘Out
of about 80 institutions of higher education, perhaps a dozen will be internationally
significant in research, and perhaps rather more than a dozen will do no
research at all.’

While all these changes to research have been discussed and planned,
the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals has been concentrating
on the planned doubling of the numbers of students. The focus on how to
teach the growing numbers of undergraduates – without a corresponding increasein
funding – has left changes to research structure little discussed.

The chief worry about the new arrangements for financing research is
that it is likely to make the dual-support system wither and die for lack
of funds. Although Clarke and Richmond make it clear that they intend to
refine the system, not break it, even Clarke now accepts that there are
‘inevitable tendencies’ for some universities to specialise in research
and some in teaching.

The most obvious casualties of these changes would be the isolated researcher
with a bright idea. And the most frequently affected will be young researchers
who have yet to establish a name for themselves. Critics also fear that
the new formula could lead to stagnation, with research funds going year
after year to the same departments. During the 1970s, for example, the University
of Dundee built up from scratch Britain’s top biochemistry department.

Dundee is widely quoted as a success of the dual-support system. But
the biochemists say their success owed less to this than to the general
sloppiness of university accounting in the past. ‘The university did not
realise that we were overspending by ten times,’ says Philip Cohen, a professor
there since the early 70s. ‘We had a huge interest-free loan. But universities
take much greater care of their finance now.’ It would be difficult to build
up such a department now, not because of the funding changes, but because
universities keep stricter accounts.

Successful departments such as Cohen’s will be the winners in the new
system; in fact, he is strongly in favour of dividing research from teaching
funds because he thinks biochemistry is subsidising other departments at
Dundee. Among the losers will be productive scientists in low-rated departments.
Some feel that the diversity of research may suffer. The quality of teaching
in departments unable to afford research is also questioned. The traditional
view, championed by Atiyah, is that teachers benefit from research and researchers
benefit from teaching.

Steps can be taken to avoid the worst of these problems. There is talk,
for example, within the Economic and Social Research Council, of establishing
national centres of excellence which an isolated researcher could visit.
And universities will still receive a block grant from the UFC; they decide
where to direct their own money even to the extent of setting up new departments.

Atiyah has raised a fundamental objection to the new plans. He points
out that the cost of research, and the need for concentration, varies widely
between disciplines. An astronomer costs much more than a mathematician
or a botanist. Atiyah believes that while concentration is necessary in
expensive subjects such as particle physics, it is pointless, even harmful
in most others. ‘For all us intellectual labourers, our main concern is
that we should be allowed the freedom and time to think and create,’ he
says.

Without hundreds of millions of pounds of extra money for university
research, something will have to change, and the emergence of a system in
which research and teaching are separated is widely considered inevitable.
‘The changes are insidious, and will not produce a noticeable effect for
15 to 20 years,’ says Denis Noble of the lobby group Save British Science.
‘It is a response to the shortage of funds and in the long term will produce
a reduction in the science base.’

In the years since the ABRC proposals were rejected, the consensus on
research funding has shifted. The desire to preserve everything of the traditional
system despite tighter purse strings has become the need to preserve the
best. If the gamble succeeds, Britain will keep its network of strong research
centres across the sciences. If it does not, Britain will have lost a large
number of university researchers for good.