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The Russell Groupies

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , , , on November 29, 2013 by telescoper

There’s an interesting article in Research Professional upon which I thought a brief comment would be appropriate. The article is mainly about the recent demise of the 1994 Group of universities, made inevitable when some of its larger members jumped ship to climb on board the much posher Russell Group. I’ve always felt that mission groups of this type were of little interest or value, but the growth of the Russell Group has, in my view, become rather sinister because it involves a cynical attempt to manufacture status when none is justified by performance.

The piece in Research Professional says:

Vice-chancellors and principals are not the only ones playing the status game. Students, employers, academics and government ministers—who seem to love visiting Russell Group universities—all want to be associated with high-status universities, even if those institutions do not necessarily provide better education or research. A 2009 analysis of the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, carried out by the Higher Education Policy Institute, found that Russell Group institutions performed only half a percentage point better than the overall average, and that when universities in the golden triangle were excluded the score fell to below average. Truly, this is an emperor with very modest clothes.

This echoes my experience. Before moving to the University of Sussex earlier this year I worked in two Russell Group universities (and one which wasn’t in the Russell Group when I worked there but is now). All these institutions have much to recommend them – and I have no desire whatsoever to say negative things about former colleagues – but it is clear to me that they (or at least their Physics Departments) can’t claim to be any better than the one in which I currently work. Indeed the Physics department that performed best in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise was Lancaster, which is also not in the Russell Group.

It’s also noticeable that the primary characteristic of Russell Group universities in the National Student Survey tables is that they generally do quite poorly relative to non-members. Does Russell Group status mean promoting research at the expense of teaching and the student experience generally?

There’s no doubt that by many metrics there is a group of “elite” English universities – Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, and Imperial. The Russell group comprises these and a few other excellent institutions. But the later additions are simply a group of fairly average universities who thought the £500,000 joining fee was worth paying to try to convince students and others that they had elite status too. Worryingly, it seems that the Russel Brand Group Group Brand has been marketed so effectively that politicians are starting to talk as if “research intensive” and “Russell Group” mean one and the same thing.

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How to segregate your lecture

Posted in Education, Politics with tags , on November 26, 2013 by telescoper

Following the announcement that UniversitiesUK has decided that it is acceptable for audiences at events held at UK universities to be segregated by gender, I thought I’d would explain how such segregation should be achieved for speakers who require it.

To start with the lecture theatre chosen for the event should be equipped with suitable man-sized box trunk or cabinet into which the guest speaker is to be placed. An illustrative example of the type of container required is shown here:

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Care must of course be taken to ensure that the box is of sufficiently large dimensions that it is capable of containing the speaker without causing undue discomfort.

Before the audience is admitted to the event, the speaker should be placed inside the box whereupon it should be locked.

The audience can then enter the lecture theatre, sit down wherever they like and make themselves comfortable, being confident that the appropriate level of segregation has been enforced.

An additional advantage of this scheme is that a suitably chosen box will make it impossible for the audience to hear the stream of misogynistic drivel produced by the invited guest, thus ensuring that the event runs smoothly and without disruption.

I hope this clarifies the situation.

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BIS Budget Horrors

Posted in Finance, Politics, Science Politics on November 25, 2013 by telescoper

Just back from my travels so I only have time for a brief post today, but it’s about something potentially very important. It seems that there are big problems with the budget for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills which includes the budget for universities in England and also the Research Councils under the umbrella of RCUK. The government has lost control over the number of students recruited into universities – particularly privately run colleges – with the result that it faces a massive £1.4 billion recurrent overspend. A leaked memorandum suggests making immediate £350 million cuts into funding for the poorest students, which is bad enough, but nowhere near enough. It seems the rest of the shortfall will have to be tackled by big cuts in the previously “ring-fenced” science budget. Such a move would run counter to numerous pledges made by the Minister David Willetts and would be devastating for the already underfunded science budget. There is already talk of the Science and Technology Facilities Council having to close one of its major research facilities.

I don’t like to say I told you so, but I have had suspicions for a long time that the government was planning to cut the amount of QR research funding allocated via the 2014 Research Excellence Framework to which submissions are due at the end of this week. Now I think it is virtually inevitable that all the years of preparation for this exercise across the country will earn universities virtually nothing. The total amount allocated via the QR mechanism is currently £1.6 billion – easily enough to cover the gaping hole in the budget caused by Whitehall incompetence. Slashing this budget will hit university science departments particularly hard.

Science has struggled along during the tenure of this government with a flat cash settlement, equivalent to a 10% real terms decline. That’s by no means a good result, but substantially better than other areas of public spending. Now it looks like austerity is really going to bite us very hard indeed.

I’m very worried for students and for science. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the people responsible for creating this fiasco in the first place won’t be in fear of losing their jobs. It may be that “we’re all in it together”, but some of us are in it a lot deeper than others.

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Would Scottish Independence be Good for English Science?

Posted in Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , , on November 13, 2013 by telescoper

On Monday the Minister for Universities and Science, David Willetts, visited Edinburgh where he took in, among other things, the UK Astronomy Technology Centre and was treated to an explanation of how adaptive optics work. There being less than a year to go before the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence, the visit was always likely to generate political discussion and this turned out to be the case.

According to a Guardian piece

Scientists and academics in Scotland would lose access to billions of pounds in grants and the UK’s world-leading research programmes if it became independent, the Westminster government has warned.

David Willetts, the UK science minister, said Scottish universities were “thriving” because of the UK’s generous and highly integrated system for funding scientific research, winning far more funding per head than the UK average.

Unveiling a new UK government paper on the impact of independence on scientific research, Willetts said that despite its size the UK was second only to the United States for the quality of its research.

“We do great things as a single, integrated system and a single integrated brings with it great strengths,” he said.

Overall spending on scientific research and development in Scottish universities from government, charitable and industry sources was more than £950m in 2011, giving a per capita spend of £180 compared to just £112 per head across the UK as a whole.

It is indeed notable that Scottish universities outperform those in the rest of the United Kingdom when it comes to research, but it always struck me that using this as an argument against independence is difficult to sustain. In fact it’s rather similar to the argument that the UK does well out of European funding schemes so that is a good argument for remaining in the European Union. The point is that, whether or not a given country benefits from the funding system, it still has to do so by following an agenda that isn’t necessarily its own. Scotland benefits from UK Research Council funding, but their priorities are set by the Westminster government, just as the European Research Council sets (sometimes rather bizarre) policies for its schemes. Who’s to say that Scotland wouldn’t do even better than it does currently by taking control of its own research funding rather than forcing its institutions to pander to Whitehall?

It’s also interesting to look at the flipside of this argument. If Scotland were to become independent, would the “billions” of research funding it would lose (according to Willetts) benefit science in what’s left of the United Kingdom? There are many in England and Wales who think the existing research budget is already spread far too thinly and who would welcome an increase south of the border. If this did happen you could argue that, from a very narrow perspective, Scottish independence would be good for English science.

For what it’s worth, I am a complete agnostic about Scottish independence – I really think its for the Scots to decide – but I don’t think it would benefit the rest of the UK from the point of view of science funding. I think it’s much more likely that if Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom then the part of the science budget it currently receives would be cancelled rather than redistributed, which would leave us no better off at all.

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The astronomer who came in from the cold

Posted in History, Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on November 1, 2013 by telescoper

Here’s a fascinating little bit of history for you. The other day I discovered the old Visitor’s Book in which staff of the Astronomy Centre at the University of Sussex used to record the names of distinguished guests who appeared here to give seminars. There are many illustrious names in the book, including for example at the bottom of this page (from 1968), Ed Salpeter.
Cold War

However, the name to which I’d like to draw your attention is in the middle of this page. On 17th August 1968 the Astronomy Centre played host to two Russian visitors, an astrophysicist called Dr G.S. Khromov from the Sternberg Astronomical Institute in Moscow and a chap from the state-run Novosti Press Agency by the name of Gennadi I. Gerasimov.

I know little of Khromov’s work in astrophysics, but it is significant that he was permitted to visit the United Kingdom during the Cold War period, long before Glasnost and the eventual break-up of the Soviet Union. The second name is much more famous. Gennadi Ivanovich Gerasimov rose through the ranks of the Soviet System and eventually during the 1980s became Foreign Affairs spokesman for Mikhail Gorbachev and press spokesman for Eduard Shevardnadze.

So what was he doing in Sussex in 1968 attending an astronomy seminar? Well, the answer to that is that during the 1960s Russian scientists were generally only allowed to visit the West if they were accompanied by a “minder”, usually some form of KGB operative whose job was to ensure the scientist did not defect; the use of a press agency as cover story was pretty standard in such cases.  I’ve heard similar stories from Russian colleagues who travelled to the west under similar constraints during this period, and even some in which the scientist was the cover story for the agent!

So Gennadi Gerasimov was almost certainly at one time a KGB agent. Given the career of the current President of Russia, this should come as no surprise…

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Hymn for the Day

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , , on October 31, 2013 by telescoper

This morning’s hymn is Sine Nomine, No. 641 from the English Hymnal, and is chosen in honour of those participating in today’s strike of some University staff.

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Seeing Sense on Open Access

Posted in Open Access, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , on September 10, 2013 by telescoper

Just time for a quick post to pass on the news that the Parliamentary Select Committee on Open Access has published its report. A PDF file of the whole thing is available here. I was eagerly anticipating this publication for many reasons, including the fact that this blog (inadvertently) provided evidence to it:

A senior academic wrote on his blog that “the publisher was deliberately and disgracefully misleading the author about the RCUK policy on open access in order to take money from them”. I could go on, but can you convince us otherwise, because if that is the case, this is one of the less helpful pieces of the work that the Government has decided to do?

Anyway, the good news is that the Select Committee has seen sense and produced a report that is very critical of the government’s rush to Gold Open Access. Here are the main conclusions:

92. The Government’s committed and pro-active stance to increasing access to published research findings is admirable, as is its desire to achieve full open access. Gold open access, at scale, is a desirable ultimate goal, and we acknowledge that the recommendations of the Finch Report, and the Government and RCUK’s open access policies were formulated with this end in mind.

93. However, almost without exception, our evidence has pointed to gaps in both the qualitative and quantitative evidence underpinning the Finch Report’s conclusions and recommendations, most significantly a failure to examine the UK’s Green mandates and their efficacy. This has been replicated in the formulation of the Government and RCUK’s open access policies and their mistaken focus on the Gold solution as the primary route to achieving open access at scale in the UK. The major mechanism of transition must be Green open access, specifically through strong immediate self-archiving mandates set by funders and institutions, either as a funding condition or tied to research assessment as appropriate.

94. Given the emphasis the Government has placed on the benefits of open access, the Government should seek a derogation in relation to VAT on e-journals as a matter of urgency.

95. The Minister for Universities and Science and members of the Finch working group are due to meet in September 2013 to assess impact and progress of open access policy. RCUK has said it intends to review its policy in 2014, to assess how developments compare to their expectations, and to meet annually after that. As part of those reviews, both Government and RCUK must fully consider and address the conclusions and recommendations set out in this Report.

Item 93 is pretty strong stuff and I agree with every word of it! I have long believed that the Finch Report, which precipitated the Government’s present policy, was hijacked by vested interests in the academic publishing industry, greatly to the detriment of the academic community. The government needs to reverse its policy, and fast, before more money that should be spent on research and scholarship is wasted on subsidies for greedy publishers. It remains to be seen whether the government has the courage to change course.

UPDATE: See here for a more detailed and considered report by Stephen Curry

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The Welsh University Funding Debacle

Posted in Education, Finance, Politics with tags , , , , on September 4, 2013 by telescoper

Although I no longer work in Wales, I still try to keep up with developments in the Welsh Higher Education sector as they might affect friends and former colleagues who do. That’s why my eye was drawn this morning to a news item on the BBC website about the effect of the Welsh Government’s policy of giving Welsh students bursaries to study at English universities. The gist of the argument is that:

For every Welsh student that goes to university across the border it costs the Welsh government around £4,500.

It means this year’s 7,370 first-year students from Wales who study in other parts of the UK could take more than £33m with them. Including last year’s students, the total figure is over £50m.

I did in fact make exactly the same point over three years ago on this blog, when former Welsh Education Minister Leighton Andrews announced that students domiciled in Wales would be protected from then (then) impending tuition fee rises by a new system of grants. In effect the Welsh Assembly Government would pick up the tab for Welsh students; they would still have to pay the existing fee level of £3290 per annum, but the WAG would pay the extra £6K. I wrote in May 2010:

This is good news for the students of course, but the grants will be available to Welsh students not just for Welsh universities but wherever they choose to study. Since about 16,000 Welsh students are currently at university in England, this means that the WAG is handing over a great big chunk (at least 16,000 × £3000 = £48 million) of its hard-earned budget straight back to England. It’s a very strange thing to do when the WAG is constantly complaining that the Barnett formula doesn’t give them enough money in the first place.

What’s more, the Welsh Assembly grants for Welsh students will be paid for by top-slicing the teaching grants that HECFW makes to Welsh universities. So further funding cuts for universities in Wales are going to be imposed precisely in order to subsidise English universities. This is hardly in the spirit of devolution either!

English students wanting to study in Wales will have to pay full whack, but will be paying to attend universities whose overall level of state funding is even lower than in England (at least for STEM subjects whose subsidy is protected in England). Currently about 25,000 English students study in Wales compared with the 16,000 Welsh students who study in England. If the new measures go ahead I can see fewer English students coming to Wales, and more Welsh students going to England. This will have deeply damaging consequences for the Welsh Higher Education system.

It’s very surprising that the Welsh Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, who form part of the governing coalition in the Welsh Assembly, have gone along with this strange move. It’s good for Welsh students, but not good for Welsh universities. I would have thought that the best plan for Welsh students would be to keep up the bursaries but apply them only for study in Wales. That way both students and institutions will benefit and the Welsh Assembly’s budget will actually be spent in Wales, which is surely what is supposed to happen…

Well, the changes did go ahead, and now the consequences are becoming depressingly clear.

The figures in the BBC story suggest something that I’ve also worried about, which is that the WAG policy might actually increase the number of Welsh students deciding to study in England, while also decreasing the number of other students deciding to study in Wales. Why would this happen? Well, it’s because, at least in STEM subjects, the tuition fee paid in England attracts additional central funding from HEFCE. This additional resource is nowhere near as much as it should be, but is still better than in Wales. Indeed it was precisely by cutting the central teaching grant that the Welsh Government was able to fund its bursaries in the first place. So why should an English student decide to forego additional government support by choosing to study in Wales, and why should a Welsh student decide to do likewise by not going to England?

I really hope the Welsh Government decides to change its policy. There didn’t seem to be any chance of a U-turn while Leighton Andrews remained in charge, but now that he’s gone perhaps there’s hope.

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HS2 or H2O?

Posted in Finance, Politics, Science Politics with tags , , , on August 26, 2013 by telescoper

Since it’s a Bank Holiday – and a fine and sunny one at that – I’ll restrict myself to a brief post today so I can return to the outside part of the Universe and get a bit of sun while it lasts.

I saw an article in the Observer yesterday about the proposed High Speed 2 rail link (`HS2′) between London and the Midlands. The budget for this project has risen to a whopping £42.6 billion pounds. Another article in today’s Grauniad argues that HS2 is `certainly not for northerners’ benefit’, which is clearly the case because according to current plans it only goes as far as Leeds, which as everyone knows, is in the Midlands.  But  the real point is that I find it extraordinary that  we are  even considering investing such a staggering sum in a new railway with few obvious benefits to anyone other than the lucky company that gets the contract to build it. In the mean time our existing railways will continue to be poorly maintained, shockingly unreliable and of course excruciatingly expensive.

Thinking about the cost of HS2, which had earlier been estimated at a mere £30 billion, reminded me of an old post about renewable energy, and specifically the proposed Severn Barrage, which has an estimated cost somewhere between £10 billion and £35 billlion, but which could generate 2GW average power from tidal energy extracted from plain old H2O,  which is about 6% of the UK’s average demand. Of course there are important environmental issues to be dealt with – no form of electricity generation is free from such concerns – and the power generated by a Severn Barrage would be variable, with peaks not necessarily coinciding with peak demand. At least the variation is predictable, though, which is more than can be said for wind power…

Anyway, let’s suppose for the sake of argument that the price tags on these two projects are both £30 billion. I’d be interested in knowing how many people think, as I do, that £30 billion invested in tidal energy generation would be a far better use of funds than a fast train from London to nowhere interesting.

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Science, Fracking and the Balcombization of the Left

Posted in Politics with tags , , , , on August 19, 2013 by telescoper

Well, here’s a find. A rare, peer-reviewed scientific article about hydraulic fracturing. And it’s not behind a paywall! The abstract of the paper, which I’m passing (as with my earlier post) on in the (probably forlorn) hope that it will introduce some rationality into the so-called “fracking” debate, reads:

The widespread use of hydraulic fracturing (HF) has raised concerns about potential upward migration of HF fluid and brine via induced fractures and faults. We developed a relationship that predicts maximum fracture height as a function of HF fluid volume. These predictions generally bound the vertical extent of microseismicity from over 12,000 HF stimulations across North America. All microseismic events were less than 600 m above well perforations, although most were much closer. Areas of shear displacement (including faults) estimated from microseismic data were comparatively small (radii on the order of 10 m or less). These findings suggest that fracture heights are limited by HF fluid volume regardless of whether the fluid interacts with faults. Direct hydraulic communication between tight formations and shallow groundwater via induced fractures and faults is not a realistic expectation based on the limitations on fracture height growth and potential fault slip.

It would be nice if either the media or the protestors at Balcombe made some attempt to discuss the actual science behind fracking, but that seems a forlorn hope. The best I could come up with from the latter is this picture, offered by someone who thinks that anyone in possession of a set of crayons is qualified as a geologist:

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In the interest of balance, here is a link to a blog post on fracking in the USA, the first paragraph of which reads:

For some time now, proponents of the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” have claimed there was little or no evidence of real risk to groundwater. But as the classic saying goes: “the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” of a problem. And the evidence that fracking can contaminate groundwater and drinking water wells is growing stronger with every new study.

I encourage you to read it, but if you do please carry on to the comments where you will see detailed counter-arguments.

I do not have a strong opinion either way on fracking. I’d prefer to make a decision as a result of an informed debate based on evidence, but there are clearly people who don’t want that to happen and are instead intent on scaremongering to suit their own ends. It seems to me that the legitimate concerns of sensible people have yet again been hijacked by the small but vociferous mob of “against everything” anarchists who see protest as an end in itself. It’s all so depressingly puerile. There’s no fracking going on in Balcombe anyway!

Why does the Green movement – and the left generally for that matter – have to be so comprehensively anti-scientific? As long as it remains that way it will never be taken seriously.

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