AFTER an eight-year rotational stint as head of a department at Imperial
College, London and 23 years after the last one, I am having a sabbatical. This
is good cause for euphoria. Yet I am lucky: colleagues in other British
universities say that in their institutions, the paid sabbatical has been all
but abolished. It is no longer seen as an efficient way of using human
resources.

Arriving at Caltech in sunny Pasadena, I was immediately dumbfounded by the
pristine state of the buildings and grounds. Lawns, arched verandas, pools and
fountains, sculptures and magnificent trees nestle in the plain with the San
Gabriel Mountains providing a majestic backdrop. Where are the graffiti? How
could this be a university, with no sign of the tattered remains of last term’s
student posters fluttering on the walls? Where are the busted bicycles and the
crushed Coke cans?

Sadly, the contrast does not stop at the physical environment. In Britain,
academics have just been through the funding council’s Research Assessment
Exercise. High-quality research oozes from the walls at Caltech. How do I know?
Do I need to read the four best papers of every faculty member? Do I look at the
funding statistics? No. I know because the people around me are doing novel,
interesting things and are proud and confident of their ideas. They seem largely
impervious to pressures for immediacy, although Caltech is known for its
capacity for producing ideas that make it to industry with virtually no
effort.

Back in Britain, at one of the recent meetings which the Engineering and
Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) organises to tell academia how well
the funding strategies are going, I met a former colleague. “How’s your funding
going?” he asked. “Struggling a bit,” I answered, “But let me tell you, we have
had these really encouraging results . . . ” I looked up, but he had gone.
Funny, I could have sworn that he used to be interested in science. Research for
the sake of funding rather than excitement looks like a nasty cancer from nearly
10 000 kilometres away.

While scientific curiosity is paramount in the engineering/biology group I
joined at Caltech, what is most impressive is the enthusiasm with which everyone
talks about the technical aspect of their work. I was invited to talk about mine
in coffee shops, after dinner and while eating bagels.

The special seminars, too, were attended by enthusiastic and curious students
and faculty members from a variety of disciplines. The word “interdisciplinary”
actually means that individuals are fluent in several disciplines. I am talking
about a generous acceptance of the validity of the different sciences that
contrasts with a certain inhibition I sense in Britain, an inhibition which
perhaps makes truly great interdisciplinary research impossible.

The financial secret which makes it all possible at Caltech undoubtedly rests
in an unstinting support from successful alumni, far-sighted industrial
investment and, above all, the pride that American people have in their
successful institutions.

An important question facing scientists and others in Britain is why such
pride is not easily found here. Would the average British citizen be happy with,
say, more millennium funding going into fundamental science and technology? If
not, is this not a failure of the public understanding of science movement?

Of course, I may be guilty of gazing through rose-tinted glasses, such are my
feelings of temporary liberation from bureaucracy. But just as I was thinking
that I might be wrong about Britain, I heard about the failure of the Millennium
Fund application to make Imperial College’s Queen’s Lawns more pleasant,
informative and accessible to the public in a combined arts-science project.

Also, a dispassionate voice from the EPSRC informed me that although
appreciated by the referees, one of my applications for research into artificial
consciousness cannot be funded as it is not of “sufficient strategic priority”
and would not be of benefit to an industrial community (it was intended to be
“fundamental” and of benefit to a scientific community). Research that promises
to increase the sum of human knowledge is no longer justifiable, it seems. Its
industrial potential must also be obvious.

The reader may now add “sour grapes” to “rose-tinted glasses” if he or she
favours clichĂ©s. Having one’s grant applications rejected, after all, is
now a way of life for many scientists in Britain.

The same reader may also remind me that some of the greatest inventions were
made in impoverished academic attics. This is a worthy appreciation, perhaps,
but not a prescription for the future. Seen from the sun-drenched research
climate of California, collapsing physical environments seem to go hand-in-hand
with short-sighted funding policies masquerading under euphemisms such as
“fŽÇ°ù±đČőŸ±Č”łółÙ”.

If I were a betting person, I would put my money on Caltech being the real
breeding ground of foresight rather than the macho-management attitudes of
Britain’s funding bodies. Or is it that sabbaticals are truly a waste of
resources? After all, they create academic ambitions that Britain can no longer
sustain and give rise to envy for academic environments which are better than
dustbins.

Since that election, there has been some kind of a change – from years
of Thatcherian reduction of support for science and education to the current
aspirations of science minister William Waldegrave’s White Paper on science.
Unfortunately, the ‘basics’ to which he aspires are that science and engineering
are only as good as the money they make, which, to scientists, isn’t basic
at all.

The now maturing White Paper has led to something called Technology
Foresight. The words, ‘world markets’, ‘competitive edge’ and ‘quality of
life’ appear in a jumble alongside ‘wealth creation’ – the basket into
which science, engineering and technology are all dumped.

Lewis Wolpert in The Unnatural Nature of Science (Faber and Faber pbk,
1993) puts his finger on the distinction. Fundamental inquiry is not an
extension of technological need. Looking for wealth creation in good science
may at best be wishful thinking or, at worst, an error made costly through
the loss of an environment for innovation.

The state of affairs is reminiscent of the experience of the philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein when he was teaching in a village in Austria, just after
the Second World War. According to the memoirs of Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein
described the citizens of the village as ‘wicked’ for refusing him his ration
of milk because he was teaching the children mathematics – and that was
about logic, not making money. Exhortations to scientists to create wealth
are wicked in the same way, because they devalue the real contribution made
by science, which need not be related directly to making money.

I am particularly worried about engineering research. It sits in the
middle, between science and technology. Engineers work in, and exploit,
the scientific environment of the day, which they hope will continue to
expand through the unfettered efforts of their scientific colleagues.

It is equally important that research engineers should be able to contribute
in a fundamental and unfettered way. Their science involves design – that
elusive process of drawing on ideas from everywhere, including the science
pool, and nowhere. It is often mathematical in nature. Control and communication
engineers, for example, have discovered theories of stability, computational
power and communication efficiency of both manufactured and natural systems.
The American Claude Shannon, probably the most eminent engineer of the
century, gave the world the logical analysis of digital systems and the
definition of the quantity of information and quality of informational media
on which the design of all communication systems is now based.

At the end of the spectrum, technology stands to engineering in the
same relationship as engineering stands to science: it lives in the pool
created by the efforts of academic research engineering departments and
the research laboratories of government and industry.

Seen from this perspective, the Foresight programme seems determined
to turn the basics upside down. It calls on a bunch of ‘experts’ to identify
the ‘key technologies’. The word ‘key’ refers to wealth creation and quality
of life. Putting aside the impossibility of agreeing what such key technologies
might be, the might of engineering and science research is expected to
turn to the support of whatever choices will be made.

Taken seriously, such a procedure would leave those devoted to Foresight
stranded in a shrinking pool of basic knowledge of how things work. The
creation of this knowledge would be left to other nations. Can such a process
be construed as helping Britain to compete?

So, is there an opportunity to direct the efforts of the Office of Science
and Technology towards saner pursuits? In order to compete with imaginative
industrial research in, for example, large Japanese companies, the best
thing for Foresight to do is take careful stock of the basic skills and
talents of Britain’s scientific and engineering communities. It could then
challenge the technologists to look both ways: first at the pool of the
intellectual resources and, secondly, to the opportunities in the marketplace.
This would lead to a return to the basics of science – the encouragement
of enlightened exploration, the support of the researcher as a resource
and the encouragement of manufacturing industry to thrive in the pool of
expertise.

But as I write, I hear that ghostly voice which justifies any destructive
act: ‘Can we afford the luxury of what you propose? Who will pay for it?’
I fear that failure in Foresight to muster resources in the way I have suggested
hides a fearsome price. This is the price that everyone will pay now that
we are handing the right to discover new knowledge to those whose goods
we shall be importing in the future.

Igor Aleksander is professor of neural systems engineering and head
of the electrical engineering department at Imperial College, London.

What seems so special about the present winter is the impossibility
of escaping the blaring media as they remind me that I shall be able to
exercise my democratic right to vote. So, I am told, ‘don’t just sit around
and complain, get out there and do something about it – put your hand on
the tiller’. This evokes an image of my hand joined by that of millions
of others, each trying to steer the ship to improve something that touches
them most. Can democracy be likened to a ship at sea? Still, I would rather
have it that way than suffer the dreadful turmoil that someone in, say,
the Republic of Georgia must now be contemplating.

Certainly, things that I hoped for have happened since 1990. Margaret
Thatcher is no longer steering the ship and this has relieved my sense of
paranoia, if nothing else. The new captain seems to be a nice chap, more
caring somehow, but it is hard to build up strong feelings about him. He
does not have much to say about higher education, scientific research, or
the technological base of the economy, and leaves it to his ministers.

But our leaders do not seem very concerned that universities are forced
to play a dangerous game with penury and the dilution of quality. Funding
bodies are left trying to cope with more mouths to feed and a dwindling
supply of worms. I suppose that is why these bodies seem to reorganise their
committee structure and play musical chairs with those who sit on them.
I have a new theorem: the number of committee meetings in funding bodies
is inversely proportional to the amount of money they have to distribute.
On this principle some research funding councils may soon be seen to go
beyond the critical mass . . .

Information technology, which was Kenneth Baker’s great white hope for
research investment in the early 1980s, has become an embarrassing phrase.
John Alvey’s ambitious programme for advanced computer research in Britain,
which started in the early 1980s, is only talked of in hushed tones among
consenting adults. And no one, but no one, remembers Sir Austin Bide’s equally
ambitious follow-up to Alvey, and which Margaret Thatcher turned down. Those
active in what still must be a research area on which much of Britain’s
technology base depends, spend their meagre departmental funds (or even
their own money) in the scramble to Brussels for European cash.

The Department of Trade and Industry and some bits of the Science and
Engineering Research Council see the answer to these problems as lying in
things like ‘technology transfer’ and ‘collaborative projects’. When translated
by the many disappointed alpha-rated contenders for the crumbs of financial
favour, it reads something like this. ‘Sorry, if you want your research
funded you’ll have to persuade your friends in commerce and industry to
let you have the money we can’t give you. What’s that you’re saying? They
haven’t got any money either? Businesses are going bust? Not our problem
– if nobody is interested in your research get back to your lab and create
some wealth!’

To this is added the chorus from government: ‘Why don’t you just give
up doing research. Concentrate on your teaching and on reducing unit costs.
Get your degrees out faster. Take on more students, open your doors to those
who do not do too well at school, improve our higher education figures.
Well, if you must emigrate to Southeast Asia where you are being offered
better facilities, do it. Just don’t make so much of a fuss!’

When I left industry long ago to work in a university, I did so because
I felt that I could lift my sights to distant scientific horizons. This
seemed to be helping industry in a long-term way. I could make mistakes
but I could also discover things that, in the future, might save somebody
time and money. I could also teach others to take a long-term view of things
and the possibility of doing things in better ways.

Had it not actually been like that for a while, I would now be thinking
that the fault lay with my own foolish idealism. But it was like that, and
so it could be again if only someone up there noticed that the Thatcher
era brought a decline in fundamental values. It is time to put things right
again.

Alas, the damage to Britain’s intellectual fibre that many were trying
to warn against, or even fight against, may be deep and hard to repair.
Low morale, disenchantment and tiredness are the enemies that pervade institutions
that should be keen, inventive and alert. However, the malaise is not incurable.
I must put aside the temptation to think that this depression is actually
a premeditated policy of the past decade of Tory rule. To be kind, let us
assume it is just seen by our lords and masters to be good electoral stuff
to batter those who could still be blamed for the apparent damage and unrest
in universities in the late 1960s.

How often has our present education minister, Kenneth Clarke, referred
to the educational ideas of that age as being ‘trendy’ (that is to say,
‘lefty and bad’)? This goes down well as rhetoric, but I see little evidence
of it. Those who were 18 in my department in 1968 became some of the most
exacting and imaginative engineers and scientists in the 1970s. Many of
them now hold key educational posts on which our future depends. Some are
even Tory politicians. Of course, while this is just an impression based
on people I know, I would challenge Clarke to find evidence of the fact
that such people in general are in some way seriously flawed.

Then there are those who were eight in 1968. Where is the evidence that
they were scarred by their ‘trendy’ education? It is the old trick of raising
the possibility, but making it sound like undeniable truth. I do not deny
that there may have been a decline in educational standards over the past
ten or so years. It is not desperate judging by the brightness of those
(albeit select) students who enter our doors. But blaming any decline on
the trendiness of the 1960s is just a way of diverting attention from a
misapplication of monetarism to education. Clearly, education should always
be kept under review to see if things could be done more effectively. But
what counts is what goes into the equation for ‘effectiveness’. Politicians
use the word often but frequently without thinking what it might mean.

One definition they have imposed on universities over the past few years
was ‘taking out as much government money as possible to put pressure on
the institutions to get funding from the private sector’. Those who have
been most successful now find themselves most exposed to the rigours of
the recession. This could easily deprive Britain of the brainpower needed
to give impetus to a recovery. ‘Bumping along the bottom’ may be the slogan
for our future which flows directly from this definition of ‘effectiveness’.

So what are the prospects for the coming election? I am not likely to
go for more Toryism. The chances of them seeing the light and returning
to basic intellectual values in education, science and technology are thin.
Of the other two parties, my vote will go to the one that can convince me
that some of these values will be remembered even after the time of the
election.

Igor Aleksander is head of the electrical and electronic engineering
department at the Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine in
London.

The second is the unprofessionally stubborn stand of the health minister,
Kenneth Clarke, first against the collected wisdom of the medical world,
and now against virtually everybody in the fight with ambulancemen. The
pejorative way in which he used the word ‘professional’ in his gaffe (Freudian
slip?) about ambulance drivers being little different from other professional
drivers is a reminder that the government’s war on professionals is hotting
up. It would be unfortunate if the professionals were to lose it.

Another element of evidence for those who may question my premise is
a fleeting moment of a television report of last year’s Conservative Party
conference. The speaker referred with admiration to the way that the government
had ‘stood up’ to the miners, the teachers and the doctors. She went on
to encourage her leaders to keep standing up to ‘self-seeking’ and ‘destructive’
professionals who stand in the way of government decisions. I would dearly
like to find a full quote, but the speech was not reported in the newspapers
the next day.

Nevertheless, it is clear that the battle lines have clearly been drawn:
any professional group, no matter how logical, no matter how expert, can
be derided by the Prime Minister’s blind determination to follow through
some action based on slogans such as ‘advisers advise, ministers decide’,
‘making Britain greater’, ‘defying the enemies of the economy’ or ‘giving
people choice’. There is much irony in most of these but the irony reaches
notable heights in the slogan about choice. The new definition of choice
is: what the government perceives as appealing to a large enough electoral
group to matter at the next election. And this is the crux of my thesis.
As Thatcher’s administration begins to wane in popularity (in contrast with
the waxing two years ago) it becomes more vulnerable to adverse professional
opinion. To win, therefore, it must put such opinion down by whatever means.

I am sure I am not the first to point out that Kenneth Clarke’s notion
of increased efficiency in the National Health Service fluffs the connection
between redirecting costs and saving money on the one hand, and real improvements
in the service on the other. Again, words are being redefined. Clarke appears
to be using the word efficiency to mean least cost to my department. A doctor
wishing to have better contact with patients, and spend more time on caring,
could well be judged as being inefficient because his or her ‘cost per patient’
would be higher than that of a less caring colleague. The same might be
said of an academic scientist who wanted to give more of his or her time
to students.

The use of words in this way is characteristic of the technique which
is intended to create the illusion that the very best methods of industrial
management are being applied to the management of Britain: a neat and appealing
idea. But the truth is that words such as ‘competitiveness’, ‘efficiency’,
‘effectiveness’ and ‘market forces’ are plucked out of the professional
executive’s vocabulary and used to push through a Saatchi & Saatchi
veneer for presentation to the electorate. No wonder that anyone who sees
beyond the veneer has to be kept at bay!

A professional manager’s key to success lies in knowing where and when
to invest. If there is anything that should bring the current administration
down it is its inability to re late policies to effective investment. Even
reductions need a justification that go beyond the blind desire to cut public
spending. Thatcherite management policy has been unashamedly based on cost-cutting
and investment shuffling, the only result: a trivial appeasement of some
‘shareholders’ through minor tax cuts. Were an industrial executive to cut
costs in the same way without a long-term plan of investment he would be
seen as firefighting in the face of imminent disaster. Perhaps the Chancellor
of the Exchequer, John Major, is really expressing precisely this type of
failure in his gloomy forecasts on the economy. The govern ment’s defence
is that things could be much worse (particularly under another party). A
similar statement from an industrial finance director may lead the shareholders
to have him sacked before the business goes bust!

To continue my argument that veneer-like use of management concepts
is the current style, I refer to the message from John MacGregor, the Secretary
of State for Education and Science, to the Committee of Vice Chancellors
and Principals of the Universities of the United Kingdom last September.
This was directed at ‘Efficiency, Economy and Effectiveness’ in the universities.
First, MacGregor should be congratulated on being brave enough to have defined
some of these terms, something that many of his colleagues consistently
fail to do. In line with industrial practice, his definition of efficiency
is quite correct: it is the cost per student, paralleling the cost per manufactured
unit in a factory. But for a given factory, efficiency may be increased
in three ways: (1) by increased throughput supported by appropriate investment;
(2) by cutting costs of production while maintaining or increasing throughput;
and (3) by cutting costs and accepting a level of reduced throughput. Only
the first of these is effective. Increasing effectiveness is the ability
to generate a product for which the perceived added quality exceeds the
cost of adding quality. Options 2 and 3 are unlikely to add quality and
are therefore not effective. Effectiveness inescapably requires investment.

Sadly, MacGregor does not define effectiveness with the clarity of a
business professional. He defines it as ‘the open identification of financial
allocation’ and suggests that differentiating between teaching and research
and dividing the funding appropriately will magically lead to the desired
effectiveness. He also states that throughput of students is to increase,
standards (quality) are to be maintained and that funding is unlikely to
increase (that is, it is likely to decrease with respect to inflation as
it has been doing for the past few years). In professional terms, he is
asking the universities to do something, which, to a production manager,
would seem to be impossible. He vaguely points at industrial funding as
being the source of increased investment that will support standards. He
says nothing of the economic climate (high interest rates, no tax incentives)
which almost completely prevents a good industrialist from making such donations.
He talks of ‘market forces’ as being determined by ‘institutional initiative’.
This is another bit of innuendo (‘Aha! No initiative among those inflexible
university dons’) that is unlikely to produce results.

The real result has been and will continue to be an advancing demoralisation
in the universities: basic support is dwindling towards nothing, the best
and the worst may be facing penury. The excitement of combining teaching
and research in a properly supported laboratory has largely gone. Slogans
about market forces and the introducation of measures such as student loans
and ‘bidding’ are simply ways of hiding the error of sustained cuts over
the years. Playing the market forces game will merely increase the slight
differences in standards between institutions; student selection will continue
to be made on the basis of the perceived prestige of a university.

So this is a measure of the anti-professional style engendered by the
ten years of the Thatcher administration. Say it loudly, say it often, get
it backed by the Prime Minister and you can ‘stand up’ to an army of professionals.
If they complain, smear them, deny their skills, call them self-seeking
and indolent. Of the highest concern in all this is not so much the insult
to professionals, but the effect that this has on the service they provide
to the community. How on earth can the afflicted go on curing, teaching,
researching, saving lives and running their business when pushed around
for electoral gain? I trust that it is clear that in this article I am not
making party-political points. I am arguing for change. I feel that the
Conservative Party is supported by some of the best professionals in the
country. They must be thirsting for a change of administration without a
change of party. They must be looking to divert from slogans to policies
that make the best of this country’s intellectual resources. However, if
they don’t stand up to be seen and heard I hope that they will recog nise
that their favourite party may lose the next election.

Igor Aleksander is expressing a personal opinion. He is head of the
Department of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College, London.