The New College of the Humanities

AC Grayling is fronting the formation of a new private institution, The New College of the Humanities (NCH) providing degree level education, based in London and charging £18k per year. The degrees will be awarded by the University of London, under an existing scheme, the University of London International Programmes, the NCH simply being a new supplier.

The New College of Humanities is heading for the prestige market with its headline fees of £18k per year, a list of celebrity professors, a Bloomsbury location and a staff to student ratio of 1:10. It's clear from the supporting material that the celebrity professors will not be providing all of the teaching. The novelty here is that the NCH will be a private institution. The University of Buckingham has been plugging away quietly for the last 30 years or so as the UK's only private university, it is now getting increasing company. Buckingham has achieved very good student approval ratings, and has been innovative in the way it delivers degrees, managing to offer degree courses at around £18k, so it's going for a different unique selling point.

Returning to the NCH: as usual for stories involving universities in the UK, a comparison to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge must be made by commentators in the press (here and here, for example). These should be ignored as fatuous and ill-conceived - there's much more to universities in the UK than Oxford and Cambridge.

I've been rather bemused by the reaction to NCH on twitter by the people I follow, they generally have the character of "How dare a private university be created". This is bizarre to me, the thesis that some big names should endow an institution with prestige is wobbly, however opposing the idea that people should be free to decide how to spend their money on how they attain their degree seems to me rather illiberal. To cover some of the points thrown around:

1. It's not a research university. Much is made of the research / teaching link, in my experience Russell Group universities recruit lecturers on the basis of research potential (or achievement) rather than any teaching ability or teaching qualification. Having done both I can't help thinking that if I'd spent more time learning and doing teaching I'd be better at teaching. 
2. It'll be like Jamie's University, a reference to Jamie's School where celebrities were sent to teach some of our more difficult pupils with hilarious consequences. In a way we already operate this system when we recruit our top-flight researchers to teach.
3. The professoriate are not ethnically or gender diverse. Well neither are our current institutions!
4. It teaches to the University of London syllabus, which is unsurprising since that who's awarding the degree! 
5. It's narrowly parasitic, in the sense that it is taking advantage of the University of London's "public" facilities for free. This is contradicted by statements by both the University of London and the NCH, it will pay for facilities it uses.
6. It's broadly parasitic. This seems to be based on the idea that people trained with public money should only serve public institutions. Not sure where this puts people trained abroad, coming to the UK, or even worse those trained here and emigrating or myself - trained by public funds and working in a private company. It does sound like indentured slavery to me. I don't buy the idea that the UK is short of people capable of teaching at degree level.
7. They professoriate are doing it for money. Take a look at professorial salaries in the current institutions - £80k a year is not at all bad, they're already doing it for money. 
8. It only teaches humanities, no science. My experience is that outside the Oxbridge college system the intermingling of disciplines in universities is poor, particularly across the great divide.
9. A GP in the neighbourhood offers complementary medicine.
10. It's straightforward evil because private money is involved. 

There is still a "to do" list for NCH:

• they need to finalise their relationship with University of London;
• they need to fill a large part of the teaching roster; 
• they need to demonstrate the £18k per year price point will attract sufficient students to be economically viable;

I also see it having little wider significance to the teaching of humanities in the UK.

I must admit I quite like the idea of teaching degree level science to students at a 1:10 staff to student ratio without having to worry about all that grant application stuff - when do we get the New College of Science?

In summary, the NCH is a novel proposition based on a premise whose value is to be established - it's ultimately about how other people wish to spend their money and, in the absence of any obvious harm to others, they should be left to get on with it. We should be welcoming new ideas in providing degree level education: like this initiative, the Open University and the University of Buckingham, not trying to put them down at birth.

Footnotes
Some background on Cambridge Colleges, teaching and tuition fees by me.

Tuition Fees

Since I am repeatedly in the position of discussing tuition fees on twitter, I thought it helpful to put down my thoughts in one place without the 140 character constraint.

I'm in favour of supporting universities, and students, via general taxation because the benefits of university education are public: they benefit all of us. I, along with many others, benefited directly from a free university education 20 years ago. I, along with other people and companies, currently benefit from university trained lawyers, nurses, doctors, engineers and so forth, regardless of my own education. I believe that the higher education system should be reformed to separate teaching and research, and also that we should consider all post-18 training in the context of any reforms to university education i.e. we should not distinguish between plumbers and physicists - they are equally valuable. As I watched water freely flowing from a burst pipe last winter, I strongly believed the former more valuable than the later.

The Liberal Democrats have been very tied up over tuition fees because they signed a pledge to vote against tuition fees, largely it has been asserted that the pledge on fees indicates that it takes priority over all other manifesto pledges. In retrospect it would have been wise not to make such a pledge which could so easily invite such a distinction. In their defence I think it illustrates that LibDem MPs did not anticipate fully finding themselves in Coalition government, unsurprising given the last 60 years of elections. Nick Clegg did attempt to persuade the party to scrap this pledge towards the end of 2009, which would have been a politically wise move. It's worth noting that the LibDems could fulfil their pledge to the letter if they were in opposition, or in a looser electoral pact, in neither of these cases would they be able to influence the policy of the government so their opposition would be entirely decorative. No doubt many believe that LibDems should have given up Coalition government on this issue, that would have been stupid and pointless.

Politically I believe the appropriate response to not being able to fulfil the pledge is to say that the LibDems are sorry they did not receive a sufficient electoral mandate to enable them to fulfil this pledge and other manifesto pledges in coalition government. I note that more experienced government parties, such as Labour, have found it easy to brazenly ignore their pre-election pledges on tuition fees, twice, without little protest from the Labour dominated National Union of Students.

The discussion on tuition fees is made in a context where, in Liam Byrne's words "there is no money", all of the major Westminster parties proposed to address a large deficit mainly by making cuts to government spending, rather than raising taxation. In light of this, and the Browne report, making a bid for even flat central funding in the higher education sector was always going to be an uphill struggle.

I estimated previously that tuition fees could be replaced by an increase of 2p on basic rate tax, or 8p on higher rate tax and the Greens have proposed 4p on corporation tax to fund higher education. Those are tax increases of 10%, 20% and 15% respectively.  Clearly combinations of these three elements would also work. However, it must be recognised that higher education will always be in competition with other claims on the public purse. If you had £7bn to spend would higher education be your first priority? Or would it be schools, benefits, hospitals or tax cuts?

The scheme proposed by the Coalition does shift paying for university education further from general taxation. However, I believe Vince Cable has done a fair job of adding LibDemery to the Browne report, commissioned by Labour. In particular covering part-time education, capping tuition fees, and attempting to make repayment progressive. The principle difference to a pure graduate tax is that a tuition fee is stated, if not paid up front. A large number of people seem keen to imply that tuition fees will be payable up front, which they are not, and simultaneously claim that poorer students will be put off applying - perhaps because they have been repeatedly told fees will be payable up front.

As for what LibDem MPs should do when presented with the relevant parliamentary bill. It's quite clear that backbench LibDem MPs should abstain, those that vote against are free to do so but should suffer the consequences in terms of party discipline. Government ministers are in a less clear position, the Coalition agreement does allow for them to abstain, however particularly in Vince Cable's case, where he was heavily involved in developing the proposed legislation and feels happy with the results, it seems to me he must vote in favour - anything else just looks strange. There is a logic for all Liberal Democrat government ministers voting for the tuition fee proposals, this would be the case in a simple, one-party majority government.

In a coalition government, the policy of the component parties is not the same thing as the policy of the government. I tentatively believe the LibDems should retain an ambition to fund higher education from general taxation, I struggle to see how this policy will be implemented in the next 10 years but I do not feel this should rule out LibDems holding it as a policy. I believe, in future, the LibDems should avoid, like the plague, making pledges in the form that they made on tuition fees. They should also apply a disclaimer to their manifesto that they will negotiate to implement what they can from the manifesto but only in majority government will they pledge to deliver all policies.

Regulation and reward

This post is stimulated by an exchange on twitter as to why we are bothered about bankers being paid stacks, whilst seemingly less worried about football players and entertainers being paid similar amounts. This post fails to address that specific question.

Banks are rich because they handle money and take a little charge at each transaction, also they rent out money which attracts few overheads. Footballers and entertainers are rich because wealthy organisations realise that to sell a football team or a film requires a star. Doctors and lawyers are rich because they have rare skills that people are willing to pay well for, the costs of poor legal advice or poor medical advice are loss of wealth or life, respectively, and their lack becomes rapidly obvious.

Pay does not measure a person’s value. Pay measures how much money an employer believes an employee is worth to them, if the employer is also the employee this judgement may be flawed. In some cases this is easy to determine, in other cases it is not. If I look at the company I work in, higher salary goes with greater responsibility for people and greater budgets. In the case of patent attorneys, who are relatively well paid, then it goes with a marketable skill. Scientists doing science are paid acceptably, the company is clear that they are not paid more because there are not local jobs for scientists which pay better.

We’ve recently gone through repeated rounds of “How much are  you paid compared to the Prime Minister”, exclusively directed at other public sector workers. This is ridiculous. It’s usually inaccurate as well: the typical figure quoted for the Prime Ministers salary is £142,500; however he will also receive an MP’s salary of £65,738. In addition to this he has use of an apartment in central London at Number 10 and a country house, Chequers. As Tony Blair has demonstrated, the Prime Minister can also expect substantial financial rewards on leaving the position, through speaking fees, directorships and so forth that are based largely on their position of former prime minister (see here and here). The Prime Minister is also entitled to receive half of his salary as pension after he has left office, although Gordon Brown waived this payment.

People make the money they can under the situations they find themselves. I’m sure we’ll all argue that that’s not we’d do personally but let’s assume that we’re all special. Do you own up if you’re under-charged or you receive more change than you deserve or if the electrician offers you a lower price for cash? Viewed in this light the MP’s expenses scandal is nothing unexceptional. Looking at what they were up to I can easily imagine that we’d find exactly the same distribution of abuses if the expenses scheme where I work were regulated in the same way. A whole bunch of people would claim to the limit in an entirely “legal” way; a few would claim less through incompetence in milking the system and a few would act in ways that were basically fraudulent.

What’s the message of this post?

In terms of regulation: don’t rely on the goodwill of man to obtain a favourable societal outcome. Although that might work for some chunk of the population it won’t for a substantial fraction and so the scheme will fail.

Science is Vital - history repeating 1667

I'm reading Thomas Sprat's "History of the Royal Society of London, for the improving of Natural Knowledge"* published in 1667. He's just mentioned that following the return of Charles II much spending has been made on public works and goes on to say:

This general Temper being well weigh'd; it cannot be imagin'd that the Nation will withdraw its Assistance from the Royal Society alone; which does not intend to stop at some particular Benefit but goes to the Root of all noble Inventions, and proposes an infallible Course to make England the Glory of the Western World.

This seems terribly relevant to current circumstances, he does spoil it slightly by going on to say:

There is scarce any Thing has more hindered the true Philosophy than a Vain Opinion, that men have taken up, that Nothing could be done in it, to any purpose, but upon a vast Charge, and a mighty Revenue.

 Old Sprat had a fine way with words!

*Quotes are from p78-79

Making Science and Engineering a Policy Issue

This is a post on the debate organised by the Campaign for Science and Engineering in the UK featuring the science spokesmen of the Conservatives (Adam Afriyie), Labour (Lord Drayson) and Liberal Democrat (Evan Harris) parties. The debate was structured around pre-selected questions presented to the panel. It was chaired by Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist and hosted at the Institute of Engineering and Technology.

Lord Drayson benefited from not being on the end of another sustained assault regarding the Science and Technology Facilities Council funding difficulties which have been a centrepiece of most of his recent public outings in this type of forum. The consensus seemed to be that outside problems with the STFC, science and technology had done quite well under Labour. The concerns over impact, which I discussed in a previous post made a showing, my view is that Impact is important but so is the way you measure and use it and the current ideas don't seem to be going in the right direction. Lord Drayson was able to make a fair defence of recent government policy over stimulus which focuses on the shorter term when compared to stimulus packages in other countries, but he seemed shaky over how cuts in the higher education budget would be achieved.

Adam Afriyie suffered from the disadvantage of being in a party who seem to have consciously steered themselves away from concrete policy statements, spending a lot of time criticising the government but unable to enunciate much clear policy of their own. Concrete policies included a deferment of the REF Impact statements for 2 years (announced this morning), and the waiving of student debts for those going on to teach science. The statement that the "zeitgeist" of David Cameron would lead to increased charitable giving to the medical was met with the online equivalent of wry laughter, as a policy this seems particularly empty. The enthusiastic support of Chris Grayling (Tory shadow home secretary) for the sacking of Professor Nutt and his own rather confused position on the hiring and firing of scientific advisors, did not go down well.

Evan Harris, described in the Daily Mail as "Dr Death", seemed to do particularly well, he may well have known that the audience was broadly on his side, as a party not in power the Liberal Democrats have not had the opportunity to wind up the science and technology community through the routine decisions of government. Furthermore academic scientists at least could well be described as "broadly lefty". However when engaged in the politic-ing which was inevitable when bringing together politicians in the run up to a general election, he did appear to apply his own twist rather than an obvious parroting of the party line. On the policy front: the Liberal Democrat conference recently approved an amendment, which puts meat on more general mutterings that "something must be done" about libel reform. He also highlighted, as a policy, that money used in the recently rescinded cut in VAT could have gone more usefully into a scientific stimulus package.

All of the spokesman were clear on the importance of science in both policy decisions and in economic terms, and they all seemed keen to make both politicians and civil service scientifically literate.

I believe the existence of this debate is welcome, I don't recall it happening in the run up to previous elections. To my mind the relatively new technology of a webcast supplemented by background twitter feed (on the #scidebate hashtag), really helps facilitate this debate, particularly in a. The larger question is how do we make science an issue for the wider voting public, given it's significant policy and economic impact.

It seems inevitable that the next few years will involve some pain in the science and technology sector, as it has across most areas of government. None of the speakers gave any indication that science and technology will receive special treatment over the next few years.

Grant Applications II

This post is probably not for you, unless you're interested in grant applications!

I touched on grant applications a few posts ago with reference to the THES debate on blue-skies research, I mentioned my abysmal grant application record, the generally low success rate and the pain involved for all concerned. Here I intend to add a few additional comments arising, in part, from my experience in industry.

It's worth stating what I believe the grant application process is for: on the face of it is a method by which discretionary funding is provided to researchers to provide resources for research; that is to say equipment, consumables and personnel. However, in addition to this it has a hidden purpose in that it is felt by many to be part of an rating process for researchers. Researchers believe that the more grant applications they win, the higher their ranking. Therefore top-down attempts to limit the number of applications a researcher can make cause consternation because they impact on the perceived worth of that researcher. This additional function is not explicit, and in a way it arises for a lack of any better measure of apparent researcher worth.

I believe this perception arises because university departments don't do a very good job of career management for academics. As an employee of a very large company, I have regular discussions about where my career within the company is going - indeed in my first year I spent about an hour and half talking about just this subject, whilst in academia I *never* in 8 years post-doctoral employment, had a formal discussion about my career development. This applies both to those who have successfully made it to permanent lecturing positions, and the many post-doctoral research assistants who aspire to a limited number of permanent posts.

The grant application process takes no account of an attempt to create a wider research program. Grant applications are made to acquire a specific piece of equipment and/or someone to carry out the research proposed. Typically the equipment will be used long after the end of the grant, and there will be no formal mechanism of replacement.

I am still involved in writing internal research proposals, these differ in two ways from grant applications. Firstly, they are much shorter than grant applications - a couple of sides of A4; secondly, they are much more concerned with all the things 'around' the core of the proposal rather than an explicit description of the research to be done. Funding and allocation of resources is made at the level of projects comprising of order 10 or more people, rather than at the 1 or 2 researcher level at which the typical grant application aims. Furthermore there is a longer cascade in the resource allocation process, rather than each 'end user' approaching the holder of a central pot, resources are allocated at a higher level. This reduces the number of people in the grant application business and means that rounds of allocation are smaller affairs.

The winning of grants appears to contain a large element of lottery, that is to say the outcome depends to a moderate degree on chance. To improve your chances of winning a lottery, you buy more tickets. This has caused the EPSRC, at least, problems since although the amount available for grants has increased, the amount applied for has increased more rapidly.

There are two solutions to the problem of researcher disillusionment through the low success rate of grant applications, one is to increase the amount of cash available (which is unlikely to happen in the current economic climate), the other is to reduce the number of grant applications made - here the problem is how to do this in an equitable fashion. Part of the problem here is that the number of potential researchers is governed by the number of people required to teach the undergraduates population, rather than a judgement on the number of people required to consume the research allocation pot.

So what does this suggest for the grant application process:
1. Better career management for academics, in order that the grant application process is not used as a rating tool for academics;
2. Devolution of spending to a lower level;
3. More thought paid to providing continuity.

I guess in my ideal world an academic will develop a coherent, over-arching research plan which is executed in pieces by application to research funds at something like the university scale. The success of such applications depends largely on past performance, and on the coherence or otherwise of the over-arching research plan rather than an attempt to evaluate the quality of a particular piece of research, or idea, in advance.

It's worth noting that academic research is seriously difficult, in that your ideas should be globally competitive - you should be developing thoughts about how nature operates at that are unique. Your competition is thousands of other, very clever researchers spread across the world. Compared to this, my job as an industrial researcher is easier - I need to communicate the answer to the question at hand to the appropriate person, if the answer already exists then that's fine. Also I get to do more research with my own hands than I would in an equivalent position as an academic.

There may be blue skies ahead

You have to feel sorry for Lord Drayson. At a time when he is doing his best to stand up for science and the funding of science in what are very difficult economic circumstances, where every department in government must show it's worth, scientists appear to be trying to hack his legs off; by balking at the proposal that they should explain their impact on society and insisting that they should be left to do 'blue skies' research. I refer to the recent debate hosted by the Times Higher Education Supplement (THES): "Blue skies ahead? The prospects for UK science", a discussion which centred around the impact of science on society and how you might increase that impact, how impact is evaluated, the role of blue skies research and the crisis at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC).

In this post I'll try to explain why scientists are so impassioned about the subject of impact assessment and make a couple of suggestions as to how we might collectively do this better.

Impact means several things in this context: there is the HEFCE Impact pilot exercise, which is retrospective and in pilot phase at the moment and there are impact statements in grant applications which were introduced this year which should provide a prediction of the economic and societal impact of the work proposed. I suspect it is the impact statements in grant applications which are causing the real concern here, and I also suspect that Lord Drayson was talking primarily about the former, and the audience and panel were talking about the latter at the THES event.

Before I go on I will provide a short autobiography to provide context for my comments: I'm currently a research scientist in a large company, I've been here for 5 years but until the age of 35 I was an academic scientist, rising to the position of tenured lecturer in the physics department of what is now Manchester University. The opinions I present here are entirely my own.

Putting aside the question of how good a scientist I am; I can tell you one thing for certain: I'm an incredibly bad at writing successful grant applications! Really bad, awful, abysmal. I wrote about 8 over my relatively short period as a grant writer and they all failed (and not even by a small margin). I don't think I'm alone in this.

Exactly what grant applications mean varies from subject to subject, but in my field: experimental laboratory-scale soft matter physics it's important: in order to do research you need people and equipment. Typically grant applications are written to get 2-3 years of postdoctoral research assistant, or a PhD student and some equipment. Your department will rate itself on the grant funding it obtains, and you on your contribution to that figure. You will definitely feel that winning grants is something you have to do to succeed in your job. You can eke out an existence without grants, funding students from other sources and helping colleagues with successful grant applications, throwing yourself into teaching but it doesn't feel like the way you're supposed to do it.

I find it difficult to put into words how much I loathed the whole grant application process. A grant application requires you to describe the research you're going to do over the next few years, and how the results will be world-class. The average success rate is about 20% (disputed) in the field in which I was applying. Once written the grant applications are sent to reviewers - actually that means someone just like you - it's peer review. Reviewers know full well that if they rate an application "excellent" as opposed to "outstanding" in any one of several areas they are damning the application to failure. Reviews go forward to a panel who plough through huge numbers of these things (about 5 times as many as they are going to fund), then rank them. Funding is given to those at the top of the list, working down until the available cash is exhausted. There are serious questions as to whether we can rank schools accurately, here we try to do it for world-class research. It's a grim process for all involved.

It's in this context that the new impact statements are introduced, potentially these contribute 25% to the grant decision. As an grant application writer I need this like I need another hole in the head! Writing the science part of the grant application is a work of pure fiction (I think it might have helped if I'd appreciated that when I was doing it), writing the impact statement: "The demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy" is going beyond that. This is forward looking, you're being asked to quantify the future economic value of that bit of world-class research you're going to do.

The problem is that university science can take a long time to trickle out, in a case I highlighted yesterday in what is a pretty applied area, research was having a very direct, specific impact 40 years after it was done. Prior to my grant seeking days my work as a PhD student, postdoc and ADR has been funded, at least in part by three separate companies - little word of the economic impact has made it back to me from these companies.

So this brings me to some concrete points:
Point 1: For many areas of research societal, economic impacts are diffuse and long term, and actually the academic proposing the research is not in the best position to determine those impacts. As an industrial researcher I've written business cases for doing external research, this is a very revealing exercise which I know I couldn't have done as an academic because I simply wouldn't have had the required information to hand. Impact statements should not be required on a "one per application" basis, they should be for whole subject fields and written in consultation with people with actual data on the economic and societal impacts.

Moving on to a second point, Lord Drayson very generously praised scientists in Britain for the quality of the science they do, but said the problem was in how this expertise is translated into wider society:
Point 2: Impact statements are purely about scientists, applying for grants in universities. The onus seems to be on scientists to fix a problem which has two sides. What are we doing about how society and industry interact with science?

In the end impact is about communication, it's about understanding the preconceptions that other people bring to the party and addressing these preconceptions in the way you communicate. Although I described myself as a research scientist, I'm actually a science communicator in and industrial environment.

This whole blog is really about communicating what it's like to be a scientist, how it feels, the little details of the tribe. The people I follow on twitter are all very clever, they do lots of different things and from a combination of tweets and blogs you learn about their lives. This is my contribution to that discussion, it's a societal impact.

A short story about scientific impact

I work for a company, I won't tell you who.

40 years ago a man wrote a paper, published in a scientific journal, you won't have heard of it, it wasn't important.

A couple of years ago I read the paper, and I carried out the calculations described in the paper. I showed the results to the team I worked with. They showed that what we were doing wasn't going to work. So we stopped the project.

There were 10 people on the team, let's say they each cost my company £100,000 a year. Let's be harsh and say that my presentation only accounted for 10% of the decision to stop.

That man saved saved us £100,000.

I wish I could tell the man that wrote the paper, so he can put it in his next impact statement.

Update: Thanks to @dr_andy_russell for pointing out my rather significant typo!