UK research’s islands of excellence need flood defences

“If you’re not doing research, you’re a further education college – not a university. Our colleges do a great job, but this country has a big skills deficit and that means it needs not just apprentices but graduates, postgraduates and PhD graduates, too.”

These are the words of Neal Juster, vice-chancellor of the University of Lincoln, quoted in our feature this week on the future of research in the UK.

The context of those remarks, of course, is the financial pressures on UK universities amid tight public finances, frozen tuition fees and clampdowns on international students, as a result of which some universities outside the traditional research elite have cut the standard time allocation for research, while others have embarked on rounds of redundancies that take no account of performance in the Research Excellence Framework (REF).

This all seems something of a retreat. When polytechnics were converted into universities in 1992 and, thereby, became eligible for research block grants, the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), as it was then, was beefed up to objectively establish the pecking order for that “quality-related” (QR) funding. Of course, the lion’s share always went to the research intensives, but by the 2008 RAE, so many post-92 departments were producing world-class work that the then Higher Education Funding Council for England felt obliged to come up with an official term for them: “pockets of excellence”.

Controversially, the label became “islands of excellence” for the 2014 REF, the better to reflect these departments’ isolation as the government made clear that it did not have pockets deep enough to expand them and preferred the idea of connecting them to the “mainland” by collaboration with established research powers.

Still, some post-92s did not give up their research ambitions and Northumbria University was widely hailed as having broken into the research elite after its performance in the 2021 REF, for which it was named Times Higher Education’s university of the year in 2022.

Now, however, the climate has harshened further and research outside the elite is being threatened by a rising tide of understandable fear about many universities’ ability to continue to afford what has always been a loss-making activity. Nor, incidentally, are those fears confined to post-92s. As our feature makes clear, many pre-92s outside the Russell Group are making cost-cutting redundancies (as are both Lincoln and Northumbria).

Those redundancies are not specifically in research, but the extent of the funding crisis is such that the confinement of research entirely to the research elite is one of the future scenarios foreseen by former Sheffield Hallam University vice-chancellor Sir Chris Husbands in a recent paper for the Higher Education Policy Institute (Hepi).

There is, to be fair, a more positive way to see what is happening: a mass pivot toward the pursuit of local impact, in both teaching and – where relevant – research. And in an era of rising public scepticism about the value of higher education (see this week’s lead opinion by a father of four students), it surely makes sense for universities to embrace a role as skill-honing engines of social mobility and local regeneration.

Indeed, as pointed out in another of this week’s opinions – by Diana Beech, chief executive of London Higher – the Labour government’s English devolution agenda potentially makes this civic redirection of universities even more important, both for institutional and regional success. But Juster is surely right that research must play a key role in this – not so much to underwrite a definition of universities as to make the best use of their talents.

There remain thorny questions about how all-encompassing the civic agenda should be and about what it means for REF ambitions given the exercise’s enduring preference for world-leading publications and widespread impact. To what extent should academics be compelled to direct their research towards specific questions? Should at least some still be permitted (or, perhaps more pertinently, funded) to study whatever interests them regardless of where it fits into the institution’s inward and outward projection of its civic mission? Can islands of excellence be created by a pro vice-chancellor’s strategic alchemy, or must they emerge by the serendipitous alignment of academics’ lava-hot research passions?

No doubt at least some inhabitants of islands of excellence would wash up in the Russell Group if the sea did its worst. But apart from the institutional pride that they would take with them, universities ought also to reflect on the enduring role research plays in establishing the reputations (and, yes, the rankings positions) that draw international students’ high fees.

Moreover, good research can at least cover most of its own costs. A case in point is Sam Wass at the University of East London, who, as our feature describes, uses his £2 million in external grants to study the development of babies – the local population of which is rich in diversity.

So while the UK research landscape’s hinterland might be unable to avoid some flooding in the current climate, universities should be wary of the suggestion that submergence is inevitable.

paul.jump@timeshighereducation.com