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Higher Education Spending in Wales

Posted in Education, Politics with tags HEFCW, university funding, Wales, Welsh Assembly Government on November 17, 2010 by telescoper

Just a quick post to pass on the news that the Welsh Assembly has now published its draft budget for 2011/12 (and following years). You can find the documents related to this here, the most useful one of which is this.

I haven’t got time to comment in detail but, being a university employee, I skipped directly to the section about Higher Education and found the following:

In order to direct funding to schools and skills, the majority of budget reductions have been focused on specific budgets. Higher Education will receive a reduction over the next 3 years of £51m. This amounts to some 11.8%, compared to the severe reductions proposed in England. The planned reductions will facilitate the statutory commitment to provide financial support for Higher Education students, numbers of which have increased significantly over the past two years. This does not predetermine the Welsh Assembly Government’s response to the Browne Review. The reductions include the efficiency savings we expect to be delivered through the implementation of our Higher Education strategy, For our Future. The commitment to the development of the University of the Heads of The Valleys (UHoVI) and Coleg Cymraeg Cenedlaethol (formerly Coleg Federal) will, however, remain a priority to
be funded from this budget.

In other words, Higher Education is to bear the brunt of protecting the budgets for Schools (which remains roughly level in cash terms) and Further Education (which is cut by about 2%). Clearly the WAG must either think that maintaining funding for Higher Education is a low priority or that money saved from HE can be recouped some other way (i.e. through increasing fees or cutting student support).

An 12% cut in cash terms is much worse in real terms, of course, but the draft budget doesn’t give any details of how this is going to be broken down in terms of research and teaching allocations. Moreover, the Welsh Assembly has yet to formulate a response to the Browne Review which has resulted in proposals for tuition fees up to £9000 per annum in England. Since the Welsh Assembly elections are to be held next May, it is highly unlikely that a new tuition fee system for Wales will be in place before then. Moreover, the fact that funding is being diverted into the new institutions described above suggests that even less money than this will be available for established universities.

We also don’t know the extent to which research will be protected. In England, a cut of 40% has been applied to teaching budgets from next year, with research funding largely preserved. It appears something similar is going to happen in Scotland, but with a much smaller overall cut to the universities budget there. Will Wales follow the same pattern, or will it sacrifice any chance of having high quality research-led universities by single-mindedly pursuing its “regional agenda”?

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Farewell to the Haldane Principle?

Posted in Science Politics with tags Adrian Smith, BIS, David Willetts, Haldane Principle, RCUK on November 17, 2010 by telescoper

Many scientists – myself included – were so relieved at the outcome of the recent Comprehensive Spending Review that we thought the government had accepted the argument that Science is Vital more-or-less completely. Most of us have stopped worrying about whether we’re going to have to go about to carry on doing science and just got on with doing it for the past few weeks.

However, today I came across some worrying news about planned changes to the way the science budget is administered in the UK. In particular, the post currently occupied by Adrian Smith – Director General for Science and Research – is to be phased out. The position will be merged with what are currently other separate positions within the Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to form a single Director General covering science, universities, research and innovation.

There’s nothing intrinsically sinister about administrative reorganisation, of course, and one can understand that a certain amount of streamlining might well be justified in order to save costs at a time of economic challenge. However, there are worrying signs about this particular change.

One thing is that the new post has only been advertised to civil servants. Apparently there will no longer be a scientist in a position to speak up for science among the higher management of BIS. Adrian Smith is not only an effective manager – as demonstrated by his past success as Principal of Queen Mary, University of London – but is also a respected figure in the field of mathematical statistics. I suspect this combination of skills and gravitas played a big role in securing a reasonably satisfactory outcome for science in the CSR.

Another worrying thing is that the planned reorganisation apparently hasn’t even been discussed with the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, John Beddington. Former Chief Scientific Advisor Lord May has reacted angrily to the new proposals, calling them “stupid, ignorant and politically foolish”. Strong stuff.

On top of all this is the apparent ambivalence expressed by the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, about the Haldane Principle, which has underpinned British science policy for decades. Roughly speaking, this principle states that it should be researchers rather than politicians who should decide where research funds should be spent.

Willetts recently responded to a question about the Haldane Principle in the form of a Parliamentary written answer:

The Haldane principle is an important cornerstone for the protection of the scientific independence and excellence. We all benefit from its application in the UK.

The principle that decisions on individual research proposals are best taken by researchers through peer review is strongly supported by the coalition Government. Prioritisation of an individual research council’s spending within its allocation is not a decision for Ministers. Such decisions are rightly left to those best placed to evaluate the scientific quality, excellence and likely impact of scientific programmes.

The Government do, however, need to take a view on the overall level of funding to science and research and they have decided to protect and to ring fence the science and research budget for the next four years. This decision has been made in the context of the current economic status of the UK and the strategic importance of research funding, while recognising the value of science to our future growth, prosperity and cultural heritage.

Over the years there has been some uncertainty over the interpretation of the Haldane principle. I intend to clarify this is a statement which will be released alongside the science and research budget allocations towards the end of this year. In order that this statement has the consent of the research community, I intend to consult with senior figures in the UK science and research community to develop a robust statement of the Haldane principle.

A superficial reading of this does start out by giving the impression that it strongly supports the principle. However, I’m not aware of what “uncertainty” there is over its application that requires such clarification. I rather think this is being put up as an excuse to limit its scope, i.e. that the uncertainty is more about how the political establishment can get around it rather than what it actually means.

The fact that the “robust statement” of a Revised Version of the Haldane Principle is going to be wheeled out just when the allocations to the research councils are announced makes me very nervous that its prime function will be to justify big cuts in fundamental science in favour of applied research.

This all seems to add up to a systematic attempt to sideline the scientists currently involved in the development of UK science policy development and its implementation. If nothing else, it seems rather strange from a political point of view to try to bring about this change in a way that is bound to alienate large sections of the scientific community, just when the government seemed to be recognizing the importance of science for the UK.

But then, perhaps I’m reading too much into it. Maybe we just have a new government that’s trying to do too much too quickly, and happens to have made a botch of this particular job…

You can find other blog posts on this issue, e.g. here and here.

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Autumn

Posted in Poetry with tags Autumn, Thomas Hood on November 16, 2010 by telescoper

Walking to work through the cold fog of a Cardiff November morning, a vague recollection of this poem popped into my head from somwhere or other only to disappear when I made it into the office. It was foggy again on the way home, so I remembered the half-memory I had earlier on. I had a look around and found the poem that had been in and out of my head.

An autumn melancholy seems to have taken grip of many folk in the department, probably because it seems like there’s long dark tunnel until Christmas, never mind next Spring. I have to say I rather like the autumn, actually…

I SAW old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;–
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

Where are the songs of Summer?–With the sun,
Oping the dusky eyelids of the south,
Till shade and silence waken up as one,
And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth.
Where are the merry birds?–Away, away,
On panting wings through the inclement skies,
Lest owls should prey
Undazzled at noonday,
And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes.

Where are the blooms of Summer?–In the west,
Blushing their last to the last sunny hours,
When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest
Like tearful Proserpine, snatch’d from her flow’rs
To a most gloomy breast.
Where is the pride of Summer,–the green prime,–
The many, many leaves all twinkling?–Three
On the moss’d elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,–and one upon the old oak-tree!
Where is the Dryad’s immortality?–
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly’s green eternity.

The squirrel gloats on his accomplish’d hoard,
The ants have brimm’d their garners with ripe grain,
And honey bees have stored
The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing’d across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a love-rosary,
Whilst all the wither’d world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drowned past
In the hush’d mind’s mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.

O go and sit with her, and be o’ershaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair:
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;–
There is enough of wither’d everywhere
To make her bower,–and enough of gloom;
There is enough of sadness to invite,
If only for the rose that died, whose doom
Is Beauty’s,–she that with the living bloom
Of conscious cheeks most beautifies the light:
There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,–
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

by Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

RIP Allan Sandage (1926-2010)

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Allan Sandage, astronomy, observational cosmology on November 15, 2010 by telescoper

More sad news. Allan Sandage, one of the founding fathers of observational cosmology, passed away on 13th November, aged 84, of pancreatic cancer.

You can read a fuller appreciation of Allan Sandage’s contributions to astronomy and cosmology by Julianne Dalcanton over at Cosmic Variance.

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Through the Looking Glass

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Mirrors, parity, Physics, Richard Feynman on November 15, 2010 by telescoper

I’m afraid I’m too busy again for a proper post, so I’ll resort once again to the supply of wonderful Richard Feynman clips on Youtube. Here’s a particularly nice one, about the mysterious matter of mirrors. I might use this later on this year when I talk about parity to my particle physics class!

Sorrowful Songs

Posted in Music with tags Henryk Gorecki, Remembrance Sunday, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs on November 14, 2010 by telescoper

Polish composer Henryk Górecki passed away on Friday 12th November 2010 after a long illness. Górecki was a peripheral figure in the contemporary classical music world whose music was known only to connoisseurs, until 1991, when a recording of his Symphony No. 3 – the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs – was released to commemorate the victims of the holocaust. The piece – and particularly that recording of it – became immensely popular around the world and sold well over a million copies – which is amazing for a modern classical CD.

Critics reacted with hostility to its success, suggesting that people were buying the CD in order to have it as background music while they sat drinking wine at home. I can’t speak for anyone else, of course, but although I don’t understand the words of the songs that are incorporated in it except by reading the sleeve note, I still find it extremely moving and listen to it regularly. I’m not very good at bandwagons, cultural or otherwise, but this was one I’m glad I jumped on.

Górecki himself said

Many of my family died in concentration camps. I had a grandfather who was in Dachau, an aunt in Auschwitz. You know how it is between Poles and Germans. But Bach was a German too—and Schubert, and Strauss. Everyone has his place on this little earth.

That’s a good thing to ponder this Remembrance Sunday as you listen to the following excerpt from the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs (which was in fact written in 1976, but not recorded commercially until 15 years later).

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Seeing Dark Matter..

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags Abel 1689, astronomy, Cosmology, dark matter, Gravitational Lensing on November 13, 2010 by telescoper

I found this intruiging and impressive image over at Cosmic Variance (there’s also a press release at the Hubble Space Telescope website with higher resolution images). It shows the giant cluster of galaxies Abell 1689 with, superimposed on it, a map of the matter distribution as reconstructed from the pattern of distortions of background galaxy images caused by gravitational lensing.

This picture confirms the existence of large amounts of dark matter in the cluster – the mass distribution causing lensing quite different from what you can see in the luminous matter – but it also poses a problem, in that the matter is much more concentrated in the centre of the cluster than current theoretical ideas seem to suggest it should be…

You can find the full paper here.

Thought for the Day

Posted in Science Politics with tags John Womersley, STFC on November 12, 2010 by telescoper

No time for a lengthy post today, as I’m off to London for (at least part of ) meeting at the Royal Astronomical Society.

However, yesterday I came across the following quote from John Womersley, Director of Science Programmes at the Science and Technology Facilities Council:

“The quickest way to get out of the economic dilemmas is to be able to evolve scientifically and that requires a scientifically trained workforce,” Womersley explained, adding that only 20 to 30 percent of astronomy is about understanding the universe. “The rest is about training people.”

Apparently this sort of message “works with government” and “intellectual purity” doesn’t.

I find this a profoundly uninspiring message for those of us who happen to think astronomy is worth doing for its own sake, i.e. that astronomy has intrinsic scientific value. John Womersley might well be right in saying that the Treasury isn’t interested in “pure science”, but where did the figure of 20 to 30 percent come from, and what does this say about the sinking status of astronomical research in the UK’s system of science funding? I fear the worst for British astronomy over the next few years, as the funding squeeze on STFC takes hold if this is what senior STFC managers really think about astronomy.

Isn’t there anyone at STFC prepared to champion the science, rather than pushing the spin-offs and training angle all the time? The latter are important, but they add to, rather than replace, the case that the pursuit of scientific knowledge is vital for our intellectual and cultural development as a society.

Another thing to point out is that STFC doesn’t actually train anyone. All the training John talks about is done by university staff. So if >70% of astronomy is about training then surely that’s an argument for a huge increase in university research grants, fellowships and studentships? Or is the idea that STFC provides the telescopes and universities provide the training in exchange for being allowed to use them?

And isn’t funding, say, the ESO subscription a staggeringly expensive way of training folk for industry or commerce? In any case the biggest barrier in the UK to having a scientifically educated workforce is actually the lack of physics teachers in state schools and the very poor quality of the science part of the national curriculum. Won’t the Treasury spot that fallacy?

It may of course be that many of you share John Womersley’s view. I’d be interested in the results of the following straw poll

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Observances

Posted in Biographical, History with tags armistice day on November 11, 2010 by telescoper

Just for the record, I sneaked back to my office a little early from this morning’s coffee break, closed the door, and at 11am precisely stood alone for the two minutes’ silence that marks Armistice Day. Cardiff University organised a collective Act of Remembrance in which the two minutes’ silence was preceded by prayers and to which all staff and students were invited. I am, however, not a Christian and the religious dimension means nothing to me, so I did what I prefer to do as long as circumstances permit and marked the occasion on my own.

As I stood in my office looking out over the road, I could see a small group of young people, presumably students, standing outside in silence with their heads bowed. I don’t really understand why but a solitary tear fell from my eye as I watched them.

At 11.02 I went back to work.

Lest we forget.

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The New Scheme for STFC Research Grants

Posted in Science Politics with tags research grants, STFC on November 11, 2010 by telescoper

Quickly donning my Community Service hat, I thought I’d pass on a little bit of news from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to my avid readership (both of them).

You may recall that a few months ago STFC sent out a consultation document to its “community”, in which departments were asked to comment on three proposals for a new system of research grant funding.

Well, the Committee responsible for considering this issue has now reported back in a lengthy document that can be found here.

So which of the three options are they recommending, do I hear you ask? Well, actually, none of them.

What they are in fact recommending, in essence, is that in future there will only be a single three-year “consolidated” grant per department in each discipline (e.g. particle physics or astronomy). The security of the existing (five-year) rolling grants will all but vanish, although a vestigial element of this will be retained by allowing some part of the three-year allocation to be spent over a 4 year period. What will also be lost is the flexibility of the current standard 3-year grants to provide a small amount of funding for novel ideas by individual researchers. In the new system, all scientists in a given department will be allowed to apply only once every three years.

The proposal clearly sounds the death knell for any form of “responsiveness” in grant funding from STFC, further strengthening the impression (which has been growing for many years) the Executive wishes to impose a rigid top-down management on all its science programmes.

It looks to me like they have combined the least attractive aspects of the three proposals into a single scheme that is considerably worse, from the point of view of delivering science, than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, STFC Council has endorsed the new proposal and it looks like it is now going to be implemented.

One might wonder what was the point of consulting on three alternatives and then implementing something completely different to all of them, but the answer to that appears to be simply the desire to save administrative costs.

I’m sure there’ll be comments and reaction to this announcement, so please feel free to add yours through the box below!

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In the Dark