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Back to Life, Back to Reality

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , , , on January 2, 2010 by telescoper

Today is the 3rd Round of the FA Cup, which traditionally marks the end of the Christmas holidays. In fact, I was going to watch Bristol City versus Cardiff City which was due to be shown live for free on Welsh channel S4C. However, the pitch is frozen and it’s been postponed. So I’ll be taking down the Christmas decorations instead…

Now that it is no longer the season to be jolly, I’ve decided to return to the theme of doom and gloom that prevailed before Christmas. In particular, you may recall that just before Christmas, Lord Mandelson wrote to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) to announce a package of £135 million cuts for next year. It has now been confirmed – see the story in the Times Higher – that these cuts are on top of huge cuts arising from decisions announced in the pre-budget statement, earlier in December. Altogether these cuts will amount to over £900 million being taken from the Higher Education budget over the next three years, or about 12.5% of the total.

The reduction in budget amounts to a cut in the “unit of resource” paid by the government directly to universities, and with a review of tuition fees currently being carried out by Lord Browne, the likelihood is that students will have to pay much more in future to make up the difference if the sector is to survive at its current level. This would require lifting the cap on tuition fees, a decision on which will almost certainly be postponed until after the next General Election (due by summer 2010). The combination of immediate cash cuts and uncertainty about the future will cause widespread unease and apprehension throughout the university system, and I think it won’t be long before we start hearing of more closures.

We won’t know what the situation will be in Wales until the Welsh Assembly announces its allocations to HEFCW, the Welsh counterpart of HEFCE. I can’t say I’m optimistic, especially after reading their recent discussion document on the future of higher education in Wales. Things might work out rather better in Scotland, where the university sector seems to be valued more highly than elsewhere in the United Kingdom.

Physics will be hit particularly hard by these cuts. It’s an expensive subject to run, and attracts only modest numbers of students paying customers. Savage cuts in research grants and postgraduate funding from STFC will have sent a clear message to university administrators that this is a risky subject to be investing in, a point of view likely to be reinforced by the inexplicably poor showing of physics in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise.  The outlook for physics and astronomy  looks even bleaker than for the rest of the university system, at least in England and Wales.

But my fears for the New Year are even wider than that. The deep cuts that have been imposed on Higher Education will save less than £1billion over the next three years. Compare that with the estimated budget deficit for 2009/10 of £178 billion and you’ll realise that it’s a drop in the ocean. The problem is that there’s an election coming up and the government is scared of trying to tackle the problem because of fears it will alienate voters. It has ring-fenced expenditure on politically sensitive things like schools and hospitals so the only things that it can cut are things that potential labour voters don’t care so much about, such as universities. And of course it realises that doing the sensible thing  and putting up income tax would be electoral suicide, although it is absolutely certain that whoever wins the next election will have to do it.

The biggest danger with the strategy of waiting until after the election before deciding to start tackling the debt crisis properly is that before long the international markets are going to realise that Britain is basically insolvent. It is true that the stock market has  recovered from its low point in March 2009, but only slowly and uneasily. The government seems to be assuming that  the markets will politely wait until Britain has gone to the polls before passing judgement on the longer term futue. However,  if sovereign debt rather than private debt becomes a major concern, I don’t think the UK economy will survive until the election without at least one major market correction, and off we’ll be into another, probably deeper, recession. It might not be the UK that sparks this off, but the levels of sovereign debt in Central and Eastern Europe could trigger a market panic that engulfs Britain too. The prospect of a hung parliament could easily give investors the jitters too.

There have been considerable increases in the level of government investment in UK universities over the last decade.  Admittedly, not all of it has been useful – much has been wasted in extra bureaucracy, pointless initiatives and ever-growing Human Resources departments – but at least years of neglect were being reversed.  Now the next few years offer the prospect of all the increases in funding being reversed. Higher education was one of the last sectors to benefit from extra government spending, and it is the first to have it taken away again.

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Another kick in the teeth…

Posted in Finance, Science Politics with tags , , on December 23, 2009 by telescoper

I shall  attempt to beat the weather tomorrow and fly up to the North-East for Christmas break. This blog will therefore be offline for a few days (if I succeed in getting airborne). I wish I had a bit of good news to post before the holiday, but I’m afraid there’s even more bad news. Yesterday, Lord Mandelson (yes,  another unelected member of the government) has written to the Chairman  of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) outlining their budget for 2010-11.

The letter confirms £180 million in efficiency savings from the 2009 Budget and an £83 million deduction following last year’s grant letter. On top of those there’s another cut of £135 million ““the higher than expected costs of student support during the economic downturn”. Of this cut, £84 million will be switched from capital baselines, leaving a £51 million cut in teaching grant.  The letter says these savings should be delivered “in ways that minimise impact on teaching and students”, but doesn’t say who should bear the maximum impact. It also says “greater efficiency, improved collaboration and bearing down on costs will need to be combined with a commitment to protect quality and access”. In other words, all we have to do is supply a high-quality service at bargain-basement prices. Easy.

The research element of the funding is held roughly constant (at the obvious expense of teaching): “we have agreed to switch £84 million from your capital baselines, so that the reductions to the teaching grant can be held to £51 million.” Although the research funding is maintained in level, Mandelson says “securing greater economic and social impact will be important over the next year”. Not thinking in the short term, then. Next year will do.

The letter also asks HEFCE to develop proposals on:

  • Creating a more diverse higher education landscape, by increasing the range of alternatives to the full-time three year degree;
  • Maximising the impact that higher education makes to the economy by supporting the programmes with highest economic and social value;
  • Supporting research concentration to underpin our world class ranking, while continuing to support excellence in research;
  • Developing a standard set of information about higher education, so that all students can exercise informed choice about courses and institutions.

What these points really mean is:

  • Realising that slashing student support and increasing fees is going to deter many students from doing a degree, Mandy wants us to make up for it by offering more part-time degrees so students can work full-time as well as studying. Bad news for laboratory-based subjects.
  • Impact again. I’ve explained what that means already
  • In the letter, Mandelson makes clear the “Government’s presumption in favour of more, rather than less, research concentration”. Apparently they don’t care about doing the best research possible, just doing it in a smaller number of places. Idiotic. More worryingly still, Mandelson asks HEFCE to suggest how to achieve this in the 2010-11 allocations. In other words he wants HEFCE to tweak the funding  allocations arising from the 2008 RAE even further to stamp out excellence that isn’t sufficiently “concentrated”.
  • One size clearly fits all in Mandy’s Discount House of Higher Education.

Finally, Mandelson leaves us with the following message of goodwill

Over the next year, moving towards a sustainable position on pensions within the sector will be a key challenge

In other words, “I’m after your pensions too….”

Merry Christmas, Lord Mandelson. It’s a good job you’ll be out on your ear after the next election. But then I assume you’ve got a nice fat pension stashed away already.

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Hard Cash

Posted in Science Politics, Uncategorized with tags , , on March 19, 2009 by telescoper

The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW) has finally announced its cash allocations for Welsh Universities over the period 2009-10. The settlement of English Universities (produced by HEFCE) has been public for quite a while already.

On the back of a poor showing in the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) by Cardiff University we were all braced for a cut in our recurrent grant, which has indeed turned out to be the case. Our total grant for teaching and research has been cut in cash terms by about 1.3% with most of the hit coming in the QR money that was allocated according to the RAE. This cut amounts to losing about £2M from the University’s budget and, including inflation, is more like a 3% cut in real terms.

That sounds bad enough (even the fact that there is a minus sign is pretty poor), but there are exacerbating factors on top. First, the National Pay Agreement has given University staff large pay rises over the past year or so. Given the large fraction of a University’s budget that goes on salaries, this means that a positive change in the grant would have been required to keep pace with the increased cost of staff wages. I’m ignoring other sources of income, of course, such as external research grants and endowments but the latter are less important to us in Cardiff than they are, for example, in Oxbridge. Moreover, the recent dire performance of the various University pension schemes has led to the proposal – virtually certain to be agreed – that the employers’ contributions should rise by 2%. This also has a big effect on the University’s budget.

The particular implications of all this for the School of Physics & Astronomy are yet to be worked out in detail, but a safe working assumption is an effective cut in our own budget of about 10%. Unless we can drastically increase our external income then some of our planned activity will have to be curtailed. With STFC having a budget crisis of its own, there seems little prospect of increasing our income from that source so it looks like we’re in for a challenging time.

There were winners in Wales, notably Swansea which has enjoyed a cash increase of about 10%, and some even bigger losers than Cardiff such as Lampeter, already a struggling institution, which has to endure a cut of 9% in its HEFCW grant.

The funding allocations for English Universities have been handled a bit differently to Wales, partly by the introduction of transitional relief to assuage the pain of some large Universities who would have suffered large drops in grant. HEFCE also ring-fenced funding for Science Technology and Medicine (STEM) subjects which helped out places like Imperial College, who would otherwise have had a cut; as it is, their allocation is up by 0.1% in cash. There was no attempt by HEFCW to implement this type of damage limitation, although it did put some extra money into STEM subjects from “other resources”.

It’s interesting to note that Cardiff’s share of the QR funds is actually steady at about 50% which is roughly where as a result of the previous exercise. Application of the English formula in 2001 would have given Cardiff 75% of the QR funding in Wales, which was decided to be politically unacceptable so it was capped at 50%. I think HEFCW used the English formula this time because it kept Cardiff at the level HEFCW wanted it at…

Furthermore the settlement for England as a whole is a tad more generous than Wales. The overall cash settlement for Welsh Universities is up by about 1.66% over last year, whereas that for England is up by 4.1%. The origin of the difference is in the QR funds which in England are up by 7.7% in cash terms but rise by a much lower amount in Wales. This isn’t HEFCW’s fault of course: it has to work with the funds allocated to it by the Welsh Assembly.

Among the English Universities to have done well overall are two that I used to work at. The University of Nottingham has a total grant that has increased by about 9.6% and Queen Mary has trumped that with 10.4%. However, another of my previous haunts, the University of Sussex is one of the few English institutions to have a cash cut like Cardiff’s. Their total grant is cut by 1.4%, which is a tough deal for them. I think the ring-fencing of STEM subjects probably hasn’t helped Sussex as much as some other institutions, as its traditional research strengths are in Arts and Humanities. The biggest loser in England is the troubled Thames Valley University, which has a cash cut of 11.7%. Ouch!

I think I’ve made it clear (here, here, here, here and here) that I think the RAE was a bit of a botch generally and that Physics was particularly badly done by. The outcome has certainly hit Cardiff School of Physics & Astronomy hard. I still can’t understand why our research was rated so poorly. Nature papers with over a thousand citations were not graded 4* by the panel, or at least not when submitted from Cardiff.

When I moved here, I had dreams of building up a nice little cosmology group but it looks like there’s not much chance of this happening, unless we find some way of getting some more money into Welsh physics. Welsh University Physics Alliance anyone?

But the cards have now been dealt. At least we know what sort of hand we’ve got. Now we have to get on playing it as best we can.

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A Welsh Affair

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , on February 26, 2009 by telescoper

Today I had the “pleasure” of attending a day-long conference called Funding, Risk and Innovation: Wales’s Engagement with Science Policy organized by the Institute of Welsh Affairs and sponsored by, amongst other organizations, the Institute of Physics. I had hoped that this would give me an insight into the landscape of Welsh science politics which might bear fruit in the future. As if.

Unfortunately, but alas predictably, there wasn’t much of interest. I think the first presentation of the day perfectly  illustrated the whole problem. Opening the batting was Ieuan Wyn Jones, Deputy First Minister and Minister for Economic Development, from the Welsh Assembly Government or WAG.  He gave a motherhood-and-apple-pie talk about how important science was to the future of Wales, took a few questions and then left. Those of us scientists who had gone to the meeting hoping for engagement between  politicians and scientists were left to discuss things between ourselves. Hardly the point.

Next was Phil Gummett, Chief Executive of HEFCW who gave the results of the latest Research Assessment Exercise (which I’ve blogged about here, there and everywhere). To my dismay he announced that HEFCW are indeed going to use the 0:1:3:7 weighting formula adopted by HEFCE, but has found a bit more cash which it will add to the pot of money allocated to 4*. However, unlike in the case of English universities, HEFCW is not going to apply any protection to STEM subjects (Science, Technology & Medicine). In the case of my own department at Cardiff University, which got a very low assessment  of 4* research, this is very bad news.

When I got home this evening I read the same news in the Times Higher. I could have found this out without wasting a day sitting  in a ghastly conference room in the soulless Cardiff Novotel. Still, the lunch wasn’t bad.

Phil Gummett struck me as quite a reasonable chap who is trying to do the right thing, but whose hands are tied by the Welsh Assembly which has decided that Higher Education in Wales is not as high a priority as Further Education, with the result that the funds available to HEFCW for research is less than it would be for English universities. University STEM departments in Wales altogether receive about £10M less from HEFCW than they would get from HEFCE if they were in England. For physics, this will probably get worse after the 2008 RAE.

The reason for this pessimism is that, as I’ve noted before, Physics did rather badly in the RAE compared to other discplines, with a significantly lower fraction of work assessed at 4* (world-leading). Since the funding formula is heavily weighted by the 4* element, physics will suffer relative to other disciplines. HEFCW will not attempt to correct this. I think the Chair of the Physics panel, Sir John Pendry, must shoulder at least some of the blame for the gross anomaly that this represents.

It remains to be seen what happens to physics nationally, but I fear the RAE may undo a decade of very effective positive campaigning about the importance of physics. I’ve already heard from various Heads of Physics departments around the country (even those who have done well in the RAE)  who have been asked by their Vice-Chancellors why they have done so much worse than other disciplines.

The final thing he said was that HEFCW would make its allocations as block grants to the Universities concerned and that they should make their own decisions as to how to allocate the funds to the departments. This sort of thing always annoys me. It’s admitting that the formula is probably stupid, so passing the buck to the institutions to sort out the mess themselves.

I spoke to a nice lady from Cardiff University’s planning department in the afternoon who said that they weren’t sure how they were going to allocate funds to Schools after the HEFCW grant was announced, and that the University as a whole was probably going to lose out in research funds, despite having 54% of all the 4* research in Wales.

The big problem is the funding gap caused by the WAG’s policy. Devolution has had a negative effect in science funding in Wales, while in Scotland it has had the opposite effect. The Scottish parliament seems much more interested in science than does the Welsh Assembly. Indeed, per capita, Scottish Universities have a much heavier level of research investment even than those in England, which in turn are much higher than in Wales.

EPSRC‘ recently allocated £82M to UK universities to fund  doctoral training centres. In all, it allocated grants to 45 universities. Wales has 5% of the UK population, but not a single grant went to a Welsh university. Of the 1200 or so students these centres will train, not a single one will be in Wales.  I can’t believe the Scottish assembly would have let such an outcome happen in Scotland.

Further strangulation of research funds is inevitable unless the WAG is persuaded to change its mind about the importance of science. But if the politicians don’t stay to listen to the arguments, how will this happen?

Over lunch I chatted to various physicists from Swansea University. Several of them had come to the meeting, but I was the only representative from Cardiff. There was a strong steer from the RAE panel for physics in terms of closer collaboration so we chatted a bit about possibilities for that. I think the consensus was that we’re probably going to be bounced down the road anyway so the best way forward would be to come up with a plan of our own instead of having someone else’s.

I promise not to mention the RAE again, until the final allocations are published in April!

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Physics Funding by Numbers

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , , on January 29, 2009 by telescoper

I just read today that HEFCE has decided on the way funds will be allocated for research following the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. I have blogged about this previously (here, there and elsewhere), but to give you a quick reminder the exercise basically graded all research in UK universities on a scale from 4* (world-leading) to 1* (nationally recognized), producing for each department a profile giving the fraction of research in each category.

HEFCE has decided that English universities will be funded according to a formula that includes everything from 2* up to 4* but with a weighting 1:3:7.  Those graded 1* and unclassified get no funding at all. How they arrived at this formula is anyone’s guess. Personally I think it’s a bit harsh on 2* which is supposed to be internationally recognized research, but there you go.

Assuming there is also a multiplier for volume (i.e. the number of people submitted) we can now easily produce another version of the physics research league table which reveals the relative amount of money each will get. I don’t know the overall normalisation, of course.

The table shows the number of staff submitted (second column) and the overall fundability factor based on a 7:3:1 weighting of the published profile multiplied by the figure in column 2. This is like the “research power” table I showed here, only with a different and much steeper weighting (7,3,1,0) versus (4,3,2,1).

1. University of Cambridge 141.25 459.1
2. University of Oxford 140.10 392.3
3. Imperial College London 126.80 380.4
4. University College London 101.03 298.0
5. University of Manchester 82.80 227.7
6. University of Durham 69.50 205.0
7. University of Edinburgh 60.50 184.5
8. University of Nottingham 44.45 144.5
9. University of Glasgow 45.75 135.0
10. University of Warwick 51.00 130.1
11. University of Bristol 46.00 128.8
12. University of Birmingham 43.60 126.4
13. University of Southampton 45.30 120.0
14. Queen’s University Belfast 50.00 115.0
15. University of Leicester 45.00 114.8
16. University of St Andrews 32.20 104.7
17. University of Liverpool 34.60 96.9
18. University of Sheffield 31.50 92.9
19. University of Leeds 35.50 88.8
20. Lancaster University 26.40 88.4
21. Queen Mary, University of London 34.98 85.7
22. University of Exeter 28.00 77.0
23. University of Hertfordshire 28.00 72.8
24. University of York 26.00 67.6
25. Royal Holloway, University of London 27.96 67.1
26. University of Surrey 27.20 65.3
27. Cardiff University 32.30 64.6
28. University of Bath 20.20 63.6
29. University of Strathclyde 31.67 60.2
30. University of Sussex 20.00 55.0
31. Heriot-Watt University 19.50 51.7
32. Swansea University 20.75 48.8
33. Loughborough University 17.10 41.9
34. University of Central Lancashire 22.20 41.1
35. King’s College London 16.40 38.5
36. Liverpool John Moores University 16.50 35.5
37. Aberystwyth University 18.33 23.8
38. Keele University 10.00 18.0
39. Armagh Observatory 7.50 13.1
40. University of Kent 3.00 4.5
41. University of the West of Scotland 3.70 4.1
42. University of Brighton 1.00 1.8

It looks to me that the fraction of funds going to the big three at the top will probably be reduced quite significantly, although apparently there are  funds set aside to smooth over any catastrophic changes. I’d hazard a guess that things won’t change much for those in the middle.

I’ve left the Welsh and Scottish universities in the list for comparison, but there is no guarantee that HEFCW and SFC will use the same formula for Wales and Scotland as HEFCE did for England. I have no idea what is going to happen to Cardiff University’s funding at the moment.

Another bit of news worthing putting in here is that HEFCE has protected funding for STEM subjects (Science, Technology and Medicine) so that the apparently poor showing of some science subjects (especially physics) compared to, e.g., Economics will not necessarily mean that physics as a whole will suffer. How this works out in practice remains to be seen.

Apparently also the detailed breakdowns of how the final profiles were reached will go public soon. That will make for some interesting reading, although apparently everything relating to individual researchers will be shredded to prevent problems with the data protection act.

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The Physics Overview

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , , , , , on January 17, 2009 by telescoper

I found out by accident the other day that the Panels conducting the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise have now published their subject overviews, in which they comment trends within each discipline.

Heading straight for the overview produced by the panel for Physics (which is available together with two other panels here),I found some interesting points, some of which relate to comments posted on my previous items about the RAE results (here and here) until I terminated the discussion.

One issue that concerns many physicists is how the research profiles produced by the RAE panel will translate into funding. I’ve taken the liberty of extracting a couple of paragraphs from the report to show what they think. (For those of you not up with the jargon, UoA19 is the Unit of Assessment 19, which is Physics).

The sub-panel is pleased with how much of the research fell into the 4* category and that this excellence is widely spread so that many smaller departments have their share of work assessed at the highest grade. Every submitted department to UoA19 had at least 70% of their overall quality profile at 2* or above, i.e. internationally recognised or above.

Sub-panel 19 takes the view that the research agenda of any group, or of any individual for that matter, is interspersed with fallow periods during which the next phase of the research is planned and during which outputs may be relatively incremental, even if of high scientific quality. In the normal course of events successful departments with a long term view will have a number of outputs at the 3* and 2* level indicating that the groundwork is being laid for the next set of 4* work. This is most obviously true for those teams involved with very major experiments in the big sciences, but also applies to some degree in small science. Thus the quality profile is a dynamic entity and even among groups of very high international standing there is likely to be cyclic variation in the relative amounts of 3* and 4* work according to the rhythm of their research programmes. Most departments have what we would consider a healthy balance between the perceived quality levels. The subpanel strongly believes that the entire overall profile should be considered when measuring the quality of a department, rather than focussing on the 4* component only.

I think this is very sensible, but for more reasons than are stated. For a start the judgement of what is 4* or 3* must be to some extent subjective and it would be crazy to allocate funding entirely according to the fraction of 4* work. I’ve heard informally that the error in any of the percentages for any assessment is plus or minus 10%, which also argues for a conservative formula. However one might argue about the outcome, the panels clearly spent a lot of time and effort determining the profiles so it would seem to make sense to use all the information they provide rather than just a part.

Curiously, though, the panel made no comment about why it is that physics came out so much worse than chemistry in the 2008 exercise (about one-third of the chemistry departments in the country had a profile-weighted quality mark higher than or equal to the highest-rated physics department). Perhaps they just think UK chemistry is a lot better than UK physics.

Anyway, as I said, the issue most of us are worrying about is how this will translate into cash. I suspect HEFCE hasn’t worked this out at all yet either. The panel clearly thinks that money shouldn’t just follow the 4* research, but the HEFCE managers might differ. If they do wish to follow a drastically selective policy they’ve got a very big problem: most physics departments are rated very close together in score. Any attempt to separate them using the entire profile would be hard to achieve and even harder to justify.

The panel also made a specific comment about Wales and Scotland, which is particularly interesting for me (being here in Cardiff):

Sub-panel 19 regards the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance collaboration between Scottish departments as a highly positive development enhancing the quality of research in Scotland. South of the border other collaborations have also been formed with similar objectives. On the other hand we note with concern the performance of three Welsh departments where strategic management did not seem to have been as effective as elsewhere.

I’m not sure whether the dig about Welsh physics departments is aimed at the Welsh funding agency HEFCW or the individual university groups; SUPA was set up with the strong involvement of SFC and various other physics groupings in England (such as the Midlands Physics Alliance) were actively encouraged by HEFCE. It is true, though, that the 3 active physics departments in Wales (Cardiff, Swansea and Aberystwyth) all did quite poorly in the RAE. In the last RAE, HEFCW did not apply as selective a funding formula as its English counterpart HEFCE with the result that Cardiff didn’t get as much research funding as it would if it had been in England. One might argue that this affected the performance this time around, but I’m not sure about this as it’s not clear how any extra funding coming into Cardiff would have been spent. I doubt if HEFCW will do any different this time either. Welsh politics has a strong North-South issue going on, so HEFCW will probably feel it has to maintain a department in the North. It therefore can’t penalise Aberystwyth too badly for its poor RAE showing. The other two departments are larger and had very similar profiles (Swansea better than Cardiff, in fact) so there’s very little justification for being too selective there either.

The panel remarked on the success of SUPA which received a substantial injection of cash from the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) and which has led to new appointments in strategic areas in several Scottish universities. I’m a little bit skeptical about the long-term benefits of this because the universities themselves will have to pick up the tab for these positions when the initial funding dries up. Although it will have bought them extra points on the RAE score the continuing financial viability of physics departments is far from guaranteed because nobody yet knows whether they will gain as much cash from the outcome as they spent to achieve it. The same goes for other universities, particularly Nottingham, who have massively increased their research activity with cash from various sources and consequently done very well in the RAE. But will they get back as much as they have put in? It remains to be seen.

What I would say about SUPA is that it has definitely given Scottish physics a higher profile, largely from the appointment of Ian Halliday to front it. He is an astute political strategist and respected scientist who performed impressively as Chief Executive of the now-defunct Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council and is also President of the European Science Foundation. Having such a prominent figurehead gives the alliance more muscle than a group of departmental heads would ever hope to have.

So should there be a Welsh version of SUPA? Perhaps WUPA?

Well, Swansea and Cardiff certainly share some research interests in the area of condensed-matter physics but their largest activities (Astronomy in Cardiff, Particle Physics in Swansea) are pretty independent. It seems to me to be to be well worth thinking of some sort of initiative to pool resources and try to make Welsh physics a bit less parochial, but the question is how to do it. At coffee the other day, I suggested an initiative in the area of astroparticle physics could bring in genuinely high quality researchers as well as establishing synergy between Swansea and Cardiff, which are only an hour apart by train. The idea went down like a lead balloon, but I still think it’s a good one. Whether HEFCW has either the resources or the inclination to do something like it is another matter, even if the departments themselves were to come round.

Anyway, I’m sure there will be quite a lot more discussion about our post-RAE strategy if and when we learn more about the funding implications. I personally think we could do with a radical re-think of the way physics in Wales is organized and could do with a champion who has the clout of Scotland’s SUPA-man.

The mystery as far as I am concerned remains why Cardiff did so badly in the ratings. I think the first quote may offer part of the explanation because we have large groups in Astronomical Instrumentation and Gravitational Physics, both of which have very long lead periods. However, I am surprised and saddened by the fact that the fraction rated at 4* is so very low. We need to find out why. Urgently.

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Res Judicata

Posted in Science Politics with tags , , , , on December 18, 2008 by telescoper

Today is the day people working in British Universities have waited for in a mixture of hope and apprehension for several years. The results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) were published at 0.01am GMT today (18th December).

I had a look just after midnight and the webserver crashed, but only for a few minutes and I soon got back in and found the bad news. The relevant one for me as an astrophysicist is the table for Unit of Assessment 19 which is Physics & Astronomy. Results are given as a list of numbers, consisting of the number of staff entered (not necessarily an integer, for accounting reasons) followed by the percentage of work judged by the panel to be in each of four categories explained in the following excerpt from the RAE website

The quality profiles displayed on this website are the results of the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE2008), the sixth assessment in this current format of the quality of research conducted in UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). The UK funding bodies for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will use the RAE2008 results to distribute funding for research from 2009-10.

The results follow an expert review process conducted by assessment panels throughout 2008. Research in all subjects was assessed against agreed quality standards within a common framework that recognised appropriate variations between subjects in terms of both the research submitted and the assessment criteria.

Submissions were made in a standard form that included both quantitative and descriptive elements. Full details of the contents of, and arrangements for making, submissions were published in ‘Guidance on submissions‘ (RAE 03/2005).

The RAE quality profiles present in blocks of 5% the proportion of each submission judged by the panels to have met each of the quality levels defined below. Work that fell below national quality or was not recognised as research was unclassified.

4* Quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance and rigour.
3* Quality that is internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour but which nonetheless falls short of the highest standards of excellence.
2* Quality that is recognised internationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour.
1* Quality that is recognised nationally in terms of originality, significance and rigour.
Unclassified Quality that falls below the standard of nationally recognised work. Or work which does not meet the published definition of research for the purposes of this assessment.

The ‘international’ criterion equates to a level of excellence that it was reasonable to expect for the UOA, even though there may be no current examples of such a level in the UK or elsewhere. It should be noted that ‘national’ and ‘international’ refer to standards, not to the nature or geographical scope of particular subjects.

For my own department, the School of Physics & Astronomy, at Cardiff University, I found the following

Cardiff University (32.30) 5 45 30 20

which means that we entered 32.30 people, but only 5% of the work was judged to be at the top level (4*), 45% at 3*, 30% at 2* and 20% at 1*. On their own these figures don’t mean very much but one can do a quick comparison with the rest of the table to see that for us this is an enormous disappointment. We have a much lower fraction of 4* than the majority of departments, and also a significantly higher fraction of 1*. These findings are very worrying.

If I were working an English University with these results I would be very concerned about their financial implications, but it’s a bit more complicated with us being here in Wales. The numbers given in the table are translated into money by the funding councils and Wales has its own one of these (HEFCW, different from the English HEFCE). There are many fewer physics departments in Wales and we’re not competing with the bigger English ones for funding. We don’t yet know how much our research funds will be cut. It might not be as bad as if we were in England, but it’s clearly not good. We won’t know how much dosh will be involved until March 2009. t’s not just a matter of funding, it’s also the national and international perception of the department in the physics community.

I can see there will be a post mortem to find out what went wrong, as most of us were confident of a much better outcome. Perhaps the format of the RAE (focussing on research papers as the measure of output) is not favourable to a department with so many instrument builders in it?

But with the economy in deep recession making further cuts in research funding likely in the future, and our major external funder (STFC) already struggling to make ends meet, this poor showing in the RAE this has cast a gloomy shadow over Christmas.

Of course many places did much better, including my old department at Nottingham which has

University of Nottingham (44.45) 25 40 30 5

which can be interestingly compared with Cambridge, who have

University of Cambridge (141.25) 25 40 30 5

You can see that apart from the different numbers of staff the profile is exactly the same. I’m sure their publicity machine will pick up on this so I won’t be the last to mention it! Well done, Nottingham!

It will be interesting to see what the newspapers make of the new RAE results. They are significantly more complicated than previous versions which just gave a single number. The scope for flexibility in generating league tables is clearly greatly enhanced by this complexity so we can bet the hacks will have a field day. I thought I’d get a headstart by doing a straightforward ranking using a simple weighted average using 4=4*, 3=3*, etc and then sorting them by the average thus obtained:

1. Lancaster University 2.9
2. University of Bath 2.85
3. University of Cambridge 2.85
4. University of Nottingham 2.85
5. University of St Andrews 2.85
6. University of Edinburgh 2.8
7. University of Durham 2.75
8. Imperial College London 2.75
9. University of Sheffield 2.75
10. University College London 2.75
11. University of Glasgow 2.75
12. University of Birmingham 2.7
13. University of Exeter 2.7
14. University of Sussex 2.7
15. University of Bristol 2.65
16. University of Liverpool 2.65
17. University of Oxford 2.65
18. University of Southampton 2.65
19. Heriot-Watt University 2.65
20. University of Hertfordshire 2.6
21. University of Manchester 2.6
22. University of Warwick 2.6
23. University of York 2.6
24. King’s College London 2.55
25. University of Leeds 2.55
26. University of Leicester 2.55
27. Royal Holloway, University of London 2.55
28. University of Surrey 2.55
29. Swansea University 2.55
30. Queen Mary, University of London 2.5
31. Queen’s University Belfast 2.5
32. Loughborough University 2.45
33. Liverpool John Moores University 2.4
34. University of Strathclyde 2.35
35. Cardiff University 2.35
36. University of Brighton 2.3
37. University of Central Lancashire 2.3
38. Keele University 2.25
39. Armagh Observatory 2.25
40. University of Kent 2.2
41. Aberystwyth University 1.95
42. University of the West of Scotland 1.8

So you can see we are languishing at 35th place out of 42.

This is supposed to be the last RAE and we don’t know what is going to replace it. I don’t at all object to the principle that research funding should be peer-assessed but this particular exercise was enormously expensive in the effort spent at Universities preparing for it, not to mention the ridiculous burden placed on the panel of having to read all those papers.

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