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'Super panels' let arts off easy
12 March 2009
Hefce board member says science subjects were held to higher standards, writes Zoë Corbyn
The 15 "super panels" set up to oversee the 2008 research assessment exercise and ensure consistent judgments across the 67 subject areas did not do their job properly, a member of the Higher Education Funding Council for England's board said this week.
Malcolm Grant, who is also provost of University College London and chairman of the Russell Group of large research universities, criticised the "huge variation" in quality profiles between subjects.
He compared physics, where 25 per cent of the best-rated department's research was judged to be "world leading" (4*), with drama, dance and performing arts, where 60 per cent of the best department's research was of 4* standard. In communication, culture and media studies, one department saw 65 per cent of its research rated 4*.
This suggested that some science subjects, where the research elite are strong, were marked more stringently than some arts-based subjects, where teaching-led universities entered large volumes of staff, he said.
"I thought that this is what the super panels had been established to mitigate and moderate," he added.
Professor Grant's comments came after last week's funding allocations showed dramatic shifts in the cash going to different subjects, based on the volume of staff submitted and the quality of research.
Accounting and finance took the biggest hit, with a loss of 60.5 per cent of funding, after nearly 34 per cent fewer staff were entered. Many language subjects also suffered.
Buoyed by staff increases, newer subjects such as media, drama and sports-related studies saw funding increases of more than 50 per cent, along with some medical-related subjects and general engineering.
Media studies showed the biggest rise in staff numbers - up 239 per cent. It achieved the second-highest funding increase of all subjects at 156 per cent, just below nursing and midwifery, which came top with a 157.5 per cent increase.
Many science areas saw small gains: for example, physics is up 9.3 per cent. But with near-static or declining numbers of researchers entered, there were drops in funding for chemistry, dentistry, metallurgy, material engineering and chemical engineering.
This week, the president-elect of the 1994 Group was due to address MPs and leading figures in higher education on the Government's policy to identify priority subjects for future research funding based on the UK's economic needs.
Paul Wellings, vice-chancellor of Lancaster University, told Times Higher Education that culture, language, arts and social sciences would be just as important in meeting global challenges as science and technology subjects.
"We need to make sure that the funding for those areas that are going to be mission-critical for the UK are properly supported," he said.
zoe.corbyn@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
Quite appalling is the huge increase in funding for the utterly discreditable pseudo-subject of "media studies". Was the aim of the RAE to encourage such grotesque charlatanry? I had thought that its aim was to support real subjects that are worthy of being taught at universities.
That's very collegiate of you. We may as well give up then and go back to alchemy as such an eminence has opined.
It may be that I have spent far too long involved in "the utterly discreditable pseudo-subject" that studies one of the major cultural changes of the last 100 years, and that I have lost track of the fundamentals of serious academic study. I'm sure, though, that those fundamentals included actually basing conclusions on evidence, and avoiding presenting opinion as fact. The facts of the RAE results could suggest a difference between UK arts and science research, but it is just possible that one of those differences is that we do have a lot of world-leading arts research originating in UK universities. And while we are at it, it could be that researchers who are closely involved in teaching are kept grounded in the real world. I would certainly like to see some research into which of these hypotheses stand up to scrutiny. I hope that Professor Kramer brings a greater care to his own studies than he does to his contributions to public debate about research funding, and to an understanding of university subjects. Surely we have a responsibility to show that public funding is used for rigorous analysis, the collection of empirical evidence, and careful interpretation of the world. I would like to be able to defend research into law on these grounds, and it would be helpful if some of the keenest minds in the country were able to see that studying the media that occupy so much of our lives could just possibly be worthwhile. When our public contributions are simple statements of personal prejudices those who financially support our work may well ask some far more searching questions of all of us involved in academia.
Gratifying that a figure of Professor Welling's standing recognises that times are changing for the UK and that the HE sector has already changed to accommodate the shift. Dissapointing that some, such as Matthew Kramer, see fit to reduce such a crucial debate to the level of a petty back street brawl.
I think we need to keep in mind that, with the exception of the decision to ring-fence science, HEFCE is following the lead of the VCs rather than making policy. Much of the changes in funding reflect changes in staff numbers. It is not HEFCE that has made the decision to employ greater staff numbers in Media Studies and fewer in FInance but the VCs themselves. Further, as I understand it, the profile within a subject influences not how much that subject gets, but how the money is distributed within it. It appears that several different issues may have have been run together in this story.
What is also concerning beneath these figures is the rationale of the financial formula, which (as far as I can see) begins by allocating funding to each super-panel based on the quality/proportion of the submissions within it. Does this explain the variance in the different amounts received per 4*/FTE in different disciplines (i.e. in addition to the laboratory subject multipier, etc)? Does this mean that an outstanding department in a weaker research panel gets penalised for being strong in the wrong discipline? (LSE...?). Or have I misunderstood the formula?
I love the STEM subjects. It's very possible, my life depends on them. The quality and value of my life, however, largely depends on the Arts and Humanities. If the UK is doing great research in Arts and Humanities subjects let's not devalue this with the politics of instrumentalism, and the narrowness of mind, that makes one team of knowledge explorers suggest leaving another team traveling on their own. If, indeed, this is what Malcolm Grant is suggesting. Collaboration, mutual support, these are the clues to excellence in research.
Here we go. Usual unthinking rejection of "media studies". There may indeed be a load of tosh out there. But flailing around blindly at everything in sight just shows the shallowness of the thinker. Think of it this way, books are media so "media studies" could as easily include English literature. And is all study of, say, film or even TV, as cultural influence really useless? I can think of a lot of science that is little more than stamp collecting. "Can we have yet another decimal point please?" But no one rails against that. Just because you do not like "the media," there is no need to go all Daily Mail on us and knock the hell out of something you do not understand.