if you could start again...
Branwen Hide
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 13:50 UTC
I was asked the following question this morning…
If you could start with a blank slate, how would you set up a research base in the UK?
I have to admit I was a bit stumped and mumbled something about training and policy makers that actually talked to each other…But it is actually a very difficult questions as in reality you will never have a blank slate to start with.
I now pass the question on to you.
If you had ultimate power what would you do?
- If you want you can start now and talk about changes you would make and things you would like to see.*
-
Replies
Jump to resultsResults
-
Of course, with so many people now going to University (at least in the UK), there are not enough people to do the teaching in the research-intensive Universities. This is a slighly controversial point, but again the trend over the last two decades has been towards large increases in teaching load, as students-staff ratios have risen.
The problem then becomes – if one were to say that there are too many researchers chasing the funding, and the solution is less researchers, who will do the teaching?
Many of the UK research Univs have gone for the “full time teacher” / teaching fellow solution, but it turns out you need loads of these to cover the work. So in practice what having a group of people like this does is prevent the other academics/PIs from having triple the teaching load of a decade ago – instead it is only doubled.
Again, since the Thatcher years in the UK it has been widely whispered that Govt would favour a model in which many of the non-research intensive Universities become teaching-only for science. This again seems to address the “too many researchers” point. However, if this were ever to happen the institutions that became teaching-only would likely lose a fair number of their best staff, since the academics who want to do research would likely leave. While there are some excellent people teaching University science whose primary motivation is teaching and education, in the main people who end up in Faculty jobs are motivated and kept interested by curiosity-driven research. Again in my experience, this remains true even if they are gravitating increasingly towards teaching, as quite often happens 10-20 years into the career.
The sort of “wide but thin spread of money to all, topped up by response-mode grants to the more successful / research-driven” I was outlining seems to me to offer a potential solution to all this. But I can’t see it happening. There is a kind of received view in UK Govt, and in UK university hierarchies, that the assessment exercises and current funding models are a good thing (or at least “inevitable”), since they are seen to “reward excellence” and “push up standards”. And they arguably do the former to some extent, though I doubt the latter. But they do their rewarding excellence partly by “reducing the baseline”. And that, which seemingly goes largely unnoticed, is the problem – at least to my way of thinking.
Results
-
