UKC

What do people think of this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11241871

Personally I think there is too much focus on teaching, our new PGcertHE scheme we have to go through is a huge commitment and when I sit down in the evening I have 3 choices 1) work on a paper, 2) work on a grant proposal or 3) work on my diploma...for me its an easy choice..

It also seems a strange comment at this time, there is a clear pattern between the amount of research a country does and its GDP. http://www.oecd.org/document/2/0,2340,en_2649_201185_34100162_1_1_1_1,00.ht...

Reducing this focus can only be a bad thing in my eyes. I find it a bit alarming, I like working with committed inspired students but have little time or inclination to spoon feed someone at a tertiary education level.

In reply to IainRUK: Classic! Stopping investing in the future = stagnation

I keep trying to put the view at work that cutting research/development budgets should be the last resort because they save money in the long term but the reverse is so often the case and research/development is the first to go.

I thought the research brought in the money. I've been looking at a KTP proposal and the university we would use stands to make a decent amount out of it.

Tomorrow's scientists need to be trained at institutions that are at the forefront of research. After all, the best universities are not about great teachers teaching, they're about great students learning from great researchers.

In reply to Philip:


but a great researcher wont always be a great, or even good, teacher and vice versa. Both sets of skills need to be appreciated and rewarded and the ones who cross over prized.

The binning of research unless its "commercially useful or academically outstanding" is curious. the time machine needed to see what will fall into each category would certainly pass both criteria. To try and make it work will need a shedload of metrics and central bodies checking equal standards which is just the sort of thing the tories claim to want to get rid off.

In reply to IainRUK: I agree, the research is an absolutely crucial part of any university and shouldn't be reduced at all. Universities are not schools. Sure, teaching is important but the research which happens at a university has a direct impact on the quality of the teaching and reducing the quantity (or quality) of research will have a detrimental impact on the quality of the teaching.

I think the amount and standard of university teaching has probably increased enormously in recent years and there really is no reason to shift the focus even further away from research. I think almost all of Willetts' comments are wrong.

I know most academics find teaching a bit of an inconvenience, but those people are often the best at teaching exactly because they are so keen on their own research. It's not a bad thing.

In reply to dissonance: No but first class research should be essential. That ensures you have knowledge of cutting edge research.

I worry we'll lose blue sky research.

In reply to IainRUK:

i guess what i am trying to say is rather than what seems to being proposed, concentrate now on the teaching, is to try and separate the two out to a certain degree
Does the average undergrad need knowledge of the cutting edge research or just a subset?


yeah it does look rather depressingly likely but then wasnt it heading that way in Labours time? if it cant be proved to provide instant commercial results then bin it.

In reply to IainRUK:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Willets

The man was a buffoon and will remain a buffoon as long as he has a hole in his arse.

A railway track politician who can only follow the lines in front of him with no divergence, no matter if it is right or wrong. No matter her has one of the best brains in the country, others have seen he cannot think apart from on brown nose party lines and will not give him a top job but let him loose wrecking education.

What nearly all politicians fail to realise is you have to invest in training and research, and back it when something needs money to progress, like the IC fiasco they let go to the states.

In reply to IainRUK:

I only ever had one good lecturer whilst at uni, the rest were all excellent in their field however most were too concerned with their own work and considered lecturing as their 'other' job.

In reply to IainRUK:

I don't know if you heard Lord May on Radio 4 about this last week (Wednesday I think) but he was absolutely brilliant.

For about 10 years I sat on a panel that decides where Govt. money on one area of science & engineering goes. It's certainly not the case, as Mr Willets seems to think, that it's given away for research that's not really needed. The pressure on budgets has been increased drastically over the last 5 years. I don't know what's left to cut.

In reply to Gaz lord:

Ditto

I did Chemistry at Birmingham and must say that 99/100 lecturers clearly couldn't give a shit about lecturing and seemed totally focused on research.

I admit, getting a 5 in the old RAE assesments and carrying out world class research takes time but now Universities are charging £3k a year I'd expect a bit more effort to go into lecturing/tutorials etc rather than feeling like it was 10 hours a week of sub-standard lectures and 8 hours "lab time" supervised by post-grads rather than having tutorials etc cos the lecturers are all too busy in their own labs...

Is it the same problem in the Social Sciences?

In reply to Sam_in_Leeds:


sister did sportex at b'ham and her concensus was all the lecturers by one were stuck up wankers

In reply to IainRUK:

It pretty trivial actually. Compare it to what is expected in US institutions on the teaching front to obtain tenure.

I think the balance is wrong in terms of what counts for promotion. It is entirely possible to become a professor while only paying lip-service to teaching. David Willets is right on this point, someone's teaching record should count much more for promotion. High quality teaching is at least as valuable to the economy as high quality research. That said, he is quite wrong to use that as an argument to cut research budgets. You are quite correct that government funded research benefits the ecomony hugely and should be maintained (at the expense of other ring-fenced areas in my view).

In reply to Sam_in_Leeds:

I did Chemistry too, although not at Birmingham. Your story does sound a sad mix of poor teaching (if you never got tutorials), but also a misunderstanding of how university should work. It's not a repeat of A-levels. You don't sit there taking notes, talked through "what you need to know", preparing to pass some exam. You should be given guidance on where to look, help when stuck, but in general it is up to you to study and learn. You can't teach everything there is to know about chemistry in ~600 hours of lectures and ~300 hours of tutorials.

If it comes down to a choice of a great teacher or a great scientist + library I'd take the second every time.

Playing deil's advocate, why does research need to be publically funded at all?

Surely really good, relevant research should be valuable enough to pay for itself? Major pharma and technology companies seem able to make good money, why not universities?

If we cut funding, surely all we'll lose is non-relevant, non-useful research?

In reply to niggle:

If you want your new synthetic routes to be owned by pharma companies then fine. But drugs will cost a fortune as research in pharma companies costs more £ than in a university. For example, AIDS is a massive drain on charitable funds in Africa - but the cost of curing it if the drugs are commercially developed will probably just as high.

Also the research that pays now isn't always the research we need for the future.

In reply to niggle:


Not necessarily, because the economic value of fundamental research isn't always apparent at the time.

Lord May last week told the story of Faraday, after he'd discovered one of his fundamental laws of electromagnetism, he was asked by a politician of the day "What possible use is there for this"? He replied "I don't know, but I'm sure you'll find a way to tax it".

In reply to niggle:


most of the "relevant" research, eg makes instant money (although even then for pharma for example they have a high fail rate), is based on lots of "irrelevant" basic research which doesnt.

In reply to niggle:

Very often it should and will, but not necessarily on a time-scale industry is prepared to fund. Therefore the government steps in as a sort of buffer. Public funded research leads to growth in the economy leads to more tax leads to public funded research is the cycle, type of thing. Much research in science and engineering is at least part funded by industry anyway.

There is also the knowledge for the sake of it argument. I doubt much of astronomy research (say) will ever have much use or be able to attract commercial funding but most people still seem to find it interesting.

In reply to dissonance:


Yes, I know - but that doesn't seem to stop a multitude of science and technology companies from being some of the largest, most sucessful companies in the world. The pay for R&D out of their profits, knowing full well that they may have to wait decades to recoup that spend.

Why can't universities do that?

In reply to niggle:

Some of their R+D. All those companies will benefit from government funded research too, both directly and indirectly.

In reply to MG:
And there's a lot of health-related research which isn't about products (e.g. drugs) but has great potential to improve the nations health. Which commercially run organisation would fund that sort of stuff? Or social research into the best practise for advocates during police interviews ? Or maths research? Or the impact of climate change on crop-ecology in developing nations?

Research isn't all about technology or developing products that can sell.

Perhaps the UK shouldn't fund non-product orientated research, but I don't think I'd like to live here (I'd be out of job for starters).

In reply to niggle:

who do you think does the basic research that they build on? Take DNA, its only really now becoming something which you can start making decent money out of.

Now you could push for an approach where we can patent even the basic knowledge but that would cripple any advances.


I doubt you will find many cases of companies waiting decades, particularly plcs since unfortunately the emphasis now is all short term, although you would get some privately owned companies and enlightened VCs who would take the longer view.
Besides R & D is subsidised in various ways by governments eg tax write offs for it plus in some cases the government paying directly (eg the US aerospace industry was carried by the massive military spending).

In reply to Jon Read:


Good points. It's hard to see how those could be made profitable (or why they should be), I agree.

In reply to DougG:


Benjamin Franklin watched the first manned balloon flight. Another spectator who wasnt overly impressed asked him what use it was, to which he responded "what use is a new born baby"

In reply to niggle:


Not really, they don't invest much if they think the pay-back will be decades.


Because patent expiry dates are way too short for that approach to fundamental research. Also, research far from market works much better with free sharing of information and building on others' work.

As an example, quantum mechanics must be worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year, given that everything containing a silicon chip depends on it, yet was developed around the 1930s with no immediate application.

In reply to Coel Hellier:


Sounds like that's a problem - time for a rethink on the patent law perhaps?

In reply to MG:


Yes, I agree, although without disagreeing with you there are still benefits of things like astronomy research. One, very long term aspect is the long term impact on science as a whole, feeding back into commerically useful science.

For example the whole idea that you could invent mathematical laws of nature started with astronomy, trying to understand the motions of the planets (Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus, etc), and that laws-of-nature approach now pervades science.

Then there are spin-off benefits. For example the development of the CCD imaging devices that are now in every camera and mobile phone was largely driven by astronomy and the need for a better imaging device than the photographic emulsion film.

In reply to niggle:


It is discrepant that if you write a book you (and your estate) get royalties until 50 years after your death, whereas if you invent a useful widget you get royalties for only 20 years after patent granting.

But patents are not the whole story, the example of quantum mechanics, being developed 70 years ago and now being worth trillions is a good one, but even so few people are going to invest for that timescale, since it is way longer than the timescale on which the person who made the decision would get the reward.

Overall scientific research is cheap compared to the long-term benefits, but the timescale is not compatible with a market model alone.

In reply to Coel Hellier:


Nor the unpredictability. If a commerical body , rather than national governments, had invested in CERN and hoped to make money from findings in particle physics, they might have been rather surprised to find the most valuable output was a new system of communication between computers!

In reply to niggle:
>> Because patent expiry dates are way too short for that approach to fundamental research.


So when you buy a computer you would like to pay a licensing fee to the 20 universities who would hold patents on aspects of transistor design, the 20 with patents on VLSI, 20 on magnetic storage, 20 on LCD technology, etc etc, and pay to support the vast bureaucracy/legal machine associated with sorting out rights and scopes to those patents?

In reply to jonny taylor:


and that would be the optimistic view. worse case would be minimal new development being done as the companies amuse themselves milking the patents and refusing to licence onwards.

In reply to IainRUK:
I'm confused, since when has 'teaching' an important skill at university? You go to university to learn, not to be taught. When I was at Uni there was one person in the department with a teaching qualification, but a lot of first class researchers.
When it comes to improving the usefulness and quality of graduates I'm not sure there is anything more important than having high quality research occurring around them.

In reply to Reach>Talent: That might be true in your core subject but not necessarily so for periheral ones. In the case of maths (which is the one I know about) there are many subjects that require a good solid maths and stats basis. Increasingly, science and engineering depts are lookiong to maths depts to provide this training and there is certainly the need for the people providing this to be good teachers - the fact that they may or may not be at the cutting edge of research is irrelevant.

In fact, it was my experience that the better a person was at research in maths the worse they were at teaching - they just weren't able to think down to the undergraduates' level and remember a time when they couldn't do advanced calculus in their head. These guys were great once you got to postgrad maths level but not before and not for scientists and engineers who use maths as a tool in their chosen subject.

In reply to alanw:


As a rule of thumb, you should never ask pure mathematicians or maths researchers to teach maths to scientists or engineers, the mathematicians indulge in an amazing amount of pedantry, sophistication and irrelevant stuff which the science students don't need and usually avoid using physical intuition.

In reply to Reach>Talent:


Since about 1990 ...


... when that changed around!

In reply to niggle:
Major pharma and tech companies make most of their money from applied reseach. They mostly take ideas that have been developed elsewhere and develop them to a state where they can make money out of them. There are very few pharma/tech companies out there that do true blue-sky research because it is just too risky for private investment to be a feasible option. The attrition rate for "established" technologies is high enough as it is. However without the blue-sky research, pharma/tech would soon stagnate because there would be a lack of new ideas coming in to the industrial sector.


To the OP, I think decreasing the emphasis on research at universities is a really bad move. There are some universities though (mostly ex-polys at the moment mind you) which separate their research staff from their teaching staff. I don't know if this is workable solution; obviously the teaching staff would need to understand and be up to date with new research. However it might get round the problem of research staff being less than enthusiastic about teaching, at least at the undergraduate level. I still don't know what I think about that option, but it's food for thought I guess...

In reply to Coel Hellier:
You may know the answer to the question we were trying to work out this morning -

Lecturers are generally paid out of central university funds rather than directly from grants. They spend some time teaching, some time doing research. A significant amount of central university funding comes via "teaching" income (government, fees etc) but they also cream off FEC from grants.

How does the balance of money coming in compare to the teaching/research workload? Which would suffer if the other was removed - or put another way, does teaching subsidise research or the other way around? It's all pretty opaque to us at the bottom of the ladder...

In reply to kathrync:
However it might get round the problem of research staff being less than enthusiastic about teaching, at least at the undergraduate level.

The much easier way of doing that is raising the emphasis placed on teaching when it comes to promotion. Attitudes would change overnight.

I am puzzled by those saying that teaching doesn't really matter. Being surrounded by high quality research and reachers is clearly important to a good university education but it is not sufficient. Unless serious efforts are made to communicate what is going, to explain what the principles are, to inspire students about subject etc, nothing will be learnt. Teaching is a much broader activity than delivering lectures and setting tutorial questions. It certainly doesn't have to be "spoonfeeding".

In reply to jonny taylor:


Yes, it is hard to work out, given the several sources of income (for research, from fEC as you say, also the money awarded through the RAE, and in some areas a lot of industry money; then the HEFCE funding for teaching).

Overall I'd say they are "roughly" in balance, with neither subsidising the other, though that can vary a lot from university to university (which have very different ratios of teaching to research) and from subject area to subject area and from research group to research group. Sorry, that's not a very definate answer!

In reply to MG:


The reason it doesn't is that the rewards to the university from good research are far more immediate and clear. If someone is a good/bad teacher then it will have some affect on drop-out rates, on the fraction getting 2:1s or 1sts, and on student-satisfaction surveys, but any such effects will be convolved with that of the ~15 other staff that might lecture a student, and anyway the financial effects of any of those things on the university bottom line are indirect and long-term -- afterall, to a first and short-term approximation the money the university gets for teaching is not affected by the quality of their teaching.

However, if someone is a good reseacher and brings in a good-sized grant then that's £100k or so from fEC and overhead straight into the coffers. So the short-term advantage is clearly to reward good reseachers, especially as these are easily poachable by other universities (from their point of view it is easy to see who are the good reseachers to poach but pretty hard to see who are the good teachers).

In reply to kathrync:
Major pharma and tech companies make most of their money from applied reseach. They mostly take ideas that have been developed elsewhere and develop them to a state where they can make money out of them. There are very few pharma/tech companies out there that do true blue-sky research because it is just too risky for private investment to be a feasible option.

Interesting point but surely this comes down to where you draw the line as to what is new ideas and what constitutes a re-hash? Do you class mass testing of a library of novel chemicals against a target as a rehash of an old idea or not? I suppose that if you compared the research into new drugs for existing targets to looking for new targets then you would probably be correct.

In reply to Coel Hellier: Yes, the reasons are clear and, to an extent, out of universities' hands in the UK but in other environments teaching is considered much more seriously, such as in the US.

In reply to Reach>Talent:


In the three pharma companies I have been involved with, we don't look for new targets ourselves, or at least not much. Instead, we scour papers coming out of universities for novel pathways or receptors which can be used as new targets. We might then be involved in crystallising that target for the first time, or developing understanding of it, but we are virtually always working with something that has been discovered by a blue-sky group elsewhere.

In reply to MG:


Yep, you're right, in the US universities are free to charge market rates for tuition, so they have to put a lot of emphasis on teaching to attract students paying considerable sums and being fairly picky as a result.

In the UK, tuition is capped at well below market rates, so there is no tuition-rate competition or quality-of-teaching competition between universities.

Interestingly enough, student perception of university quality is closely aligned with "overall university reputation" which is set primarily by research.

In reply to MG:

I agree with Coel's response to this above. In addition to this, most people who work in university research departments are there because they are interested in the research and not the teaching. It doesn't matter how you emphasise teaching when it comes to promotion/pay increase. If someone isn't interested in it, they will do the minimum they can to get where they want to go. There are many people in universities who choose never to rise above the level of post-doc because they know that the further up they go the more paper work they get and the less lab-time. I think this would just continue to happen but people would be avoiding the teaching rather than the paper-work. You need at least a small number of people around who are there because they want to teach and that is something that is lacking in a lot of universities.

In reply to kathrync:
Is this as part of a small-ish start up or one of the big ones?
I'm in late stage development so I don't see the front end, I try to avoid anything less than kilo scale and anything involving biology: Nasty squishy stuff, at least with chemistry you know there is very little chance of your experiment sneaking up on you!

In reply to kathrync:
There are many people in universities who choose never to rise above the level of post-doc because they know that the further up they go the more paper work they get and the less lab-time.

True, and there should perhaps be better career paths for them than exist at present.

You need at least a small number of people around who are there because they want to teach and that is something that is lacking in a lot of universities.

You need more than a small number for effective teaching. I think all academics should be there in part because they want teach as it is part of the job. They should also want to do research because that is part of the job too.

In reply to kathrync:
There are many people in universities who choose never to rise above the level of post-doc because they know that the further up they go the more paper work they get and the less lab-time.

Another aspect of this is that academics are to a large extent research managers (obtaining grants supervising PhDs etc.) rather than researchers, so less lab-time is to be expected. Taking an acadmic role and expecting to able to actively do research yourself for more than a small amount of your day is a bit naive.

In reply to MG:
I've always been a bit baffled by the way promotion and reward seem to be dealt with in science. If you are a good researcher your reward is to be given a job which involves a lot less research and a lot more of stuff you have displayed no obvious aptitude for.

My experience of being in university left me with the impression that ~90% of the staff with whom I worked would have benefited from a little attention to their soft skills. e.g. presentation skills, supervision skills and even basic personal hygiene skills. Without a doubt, these were all able research scientists, but given anything else to do, they were lost, or dismissive. When it went wrong for a particular student, the default defense was that the the student was there to learn, not to be taught. Frankly, if that is the case, then why do students bother going to university at all?

The 10% who knew how to teach simply served to show that the other 90% just weren't doing the job they were paid to do.

In reply to niggle: Google Blue sky research..the benefits of funding such research are well established.

There is much basic fundamental research that no technological or pharm company would touch, but that investment is necessary to build the pyramid on.

In reply to anonymouse:


I'm not sure that is restricted to science! In fact a number of major companies (e.g. Corus) have technical promotion paths that do not requirement management etc.

In reply to MG:
That sounds nice. Do they also have managerial promotion paths for those that ain't no good at the tech stuff?

In reply to anonymouse:


I'm not sure they'd phrase it quite like that, but yes!

In reply to anonymouse: Its a fair comment. The other problem is shit academics get shifted to admin roles rather than made unemployed, so they become the gate keepers and make our lives hell.

Many Universities are atrociously managed though, and court cases for constructive dismissal due to quite poor management practices are all too common.

In reply to Reach>Talent:


I currently work for one of the big name pharmas. I work in early stage development...about as early as it gets in fact and being that my area is biotherapeutics I am right in there with that squishy biology stuff

Erm, that was supposed to sound much less dodgy than it does :oD

In reply to IainRUK:
One of the things that always gets lost in the quest for efficiency is that research is, by its nature not at all efficient.
Most research is not very inspiring, or it's an incremental jump in our knowledge or it ends up being just confirmation (you got scooped or you don't have an imagination). The truly cutting edge stuff is often a matter of chance (you had a good idea in the pub and you remembered it the next day..., or you were chatting to someone that you ordinarily wouldn't and they gave you an insight, etc).

And, the most important thing is that the cutting edge stuff is only about 5% of the total. It will always only be about 5% of the total, simply because it is largely a matter of chance. If you try and make research "efficient" you run the risk of losing the 5% - there will always be a majority of researchers who actually want some sort of career and will do the "safe" stuff - i.e. they already know the answer or have a fair idea of what it will be. Squeeze too much and this will be almost everybody.

And so, we end up with little that's exciting and all the good stuff will be done in China and India where the population is so enormous that it's inevitable that clever stuff will appear.

Talk to any Nobel prize winner and you'll likely here "I was lucky" or "we were lucky". And this isn't just modesty.

In reply to Coel Hellier:

We prefer to say "well-defined, accurate and elegant"...

In reply to pneame:


"If it worked first time, it would just be called search"

In reply to Coel Hellier: I had a good night tonight chatting to some Uni profs. We had this debate really.

One of the best lectures I had was an old, disliked lecturer, stood up at the front and said 'if you don't teach me something new when I mark your scripts, forget your first'

That stayed with me, I searched the literature and got my first. Supposedly he was wrong, that's an out dated view, I thought it a great statement of great clarity. He basically said, in glorified fashion, go read!

In reply to IainRUK:


Why do you say that? I would think most of those awarded a first will present something genuinely new during their degree. Possibly rare to state this as bluntly as your lecturer, but still

In reply to crossdressingrodney:

In reply to IainRUK:
One of our lecturers in the first year came out with this "If you have perfect recall and can regurgitate the contents of my lectures on demand then you'll get 40%".

In reply to IainRUK:

We are a research intensive institution and the push has always been on increasing the research income over teaching and investment in facilities.

However, I think we overlook teaching at our own risk. Certainly we are not a technical research institute, instead focussing on humanities where the benefit of research is far less clear. While a fair number of big ESRC, BA and AHRC grants are bagged, once the PI and RA salaries and costs are paid, replacement TFs found, from what I can see, the school as a whole ends up not hugely better off. Add in the uncertainty of RAE/REF results and research looks little better than additional undergraduate students as a source of income.

Increasing our MA/MSc intake, growing Diploma or night classes has always appeared to be the better approach. Especially as I'm not convinced that a huge amount of research is actually been done most of the time - supposedly 40% of a lecturer's contract.

In reply to IainRUK:

Nothing in the original story is in any way new or surprising; similar things have been said for decades. Which begs the question "why now?"

Perhaps the answer is related to the whispers that the government intends to concentrate all UK research in about 10 universities, with the rest as teaching-only establishments. Is this the start of the softening-up process? Look out for more of the same over the next few months.