Will the funding crisis confine UK research to elite universities?

The mood was bleak when Les Back visited the sociology department at Goldsmiths, University of London recently, where he had spent almost 40 years as student and lecturer. It was February and brutal job cuts had just been announced at the south London university, which, at the time, was expected to require 130 full-time equivalent (FTE) staff to leave, equivalent to one in six staff.

That number has since been reduced to 97, but the axe will fall particularly heavily on sociology: “It’s facing a 50 per cent FTE reduction,” says Back, who left Goldsmiths in 2022 in protest at a previous round of redundancies and is now head of sociology at the University of Glasgow.

“To see 30 years of accumulated expertise wiped out so quickly is just heartbreaking,” he says of the latest proposed redundancies – concentrated in the Schools of Arts and Humanities; Culture and Society; and Professional Studies, Science and Technology – which have sparked ongoing industrial action.

In the current financial climate of high inflation, frozen English tuition fees and declining international enrolments following the government’s ban on master’s students bringing dependants into the country, grim stories about large-scale job cuts at UK universities are all too familiar. Dozens of institutions have adopted major redundancies, restructures and course closures; most recently, some 500 staff at the University of Northampton have been told their jobs are at risk as a result of a steep fall in international enrolments and a projected deficit of £19.3 million.

With each redundancy round, departments and lives have been upended, with ever more people cast on to a dire academic jobs market. But Goldsmiths’ treatment of sociology has an added significance, insists Back.

“For most of my career, UK academia has operated on the premise that research excellence would be recognised and supported wherever it was found,” he explains. “That is the meritocratic idea that underlies the Research Excellence Framework: it gives money on the basis of excellence regardless of location or type of institution. In turn, universities are encouraged to look after these pockets of excellence.”

But sociology is arguably Goldsmiths’ best-known department, ranking 13th in the 2021 REF by grade point average and seventh on research power owing to its large size. It was joint first by GPA in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. For Back, the department’s fate illustrates that “meritocracy has been broken because, in some universities, it doesn’t matter if you’re a brilliant researcher or not. You just won’t be able to do research because the current conditions have made it unviable,” he argues.

With UK universities incurring a shortfall of £5 billion a year on the research they undertake, it is undeniably becoming harder to support research at all types of institution given the pressure on the teaching income that traditionally met the research shortfall. But the funding gap is hitting medium-sized universities such as Goldsmiths particularly hard, says Back. Following the previous government’s decision to lift domestic student number quotas – a process that began in 2012 and was completed by 2016 – he notes that many Russell Group institutions have been able to shore up their finances by significantly expanding domestic recruitment – to the detriment of what some have called the “squeezed middle” of UK universities.

“It has played out exactly as we said it would,” he says of the move to uncapped recruitment.

That view is perhaps borne out by the long list of universities announcing redundancy plans in recent months. While several newer entrants to the Russell Group (Durham, Exeter, York and Queen Mary University of London) are cutting posts, it is either mid-sized research universities (Bradford, Hull, Keele, Kent and Surrey) or former polytechnics with previously growing research reputations (Middlesex, Northumbria, Huddersfield and Portsmouth) that dominate the list of downsizers.

Even if hefty job cuts are avoided, some academics may wonder if more insidious threats to research will make it impossible for them to thrive outside the large research-intensives. In March, Kent – home to the country’s top history department on GPA in the 2021 REF and the second-best law school – made waves by outlining plans to cut staff research time to a “baseline” of 20 per cent – half the level found in the typical 40:40:20 split between teaching, research and administration, respectively.

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Academics at other smaller research universities have claimed that such a policy is already in place there, with rising teaching loads making it impossible for scholars to devote two full days a week to research unless they have external grants that, in effect, buy them out of some teaching duties.

But does austerity alone explain why institutions are cutting back on research? For some affected by proposed cuts, there is a feeling that financial woes are being used, in part, as an excuse to reset the essence of their institutions – in some cases, returning them to their roots as polytechnics, in which research was a niche exercise.

“In the last REF, our department had the best output scores in the entire university, but we’ve been explicitly told quality won’t be a factor in whether we’re cut or not,” according to one professor at an under-threat humanities department – who, like many Times Higher Education spoke to for this article, does not wish to be named given the precarity of his position. “The only thing that matters is the income we bring into the university.”

He notes that his department brings in enough to cover salaries but not the required 50 per cent surplus to cover broader central administration costs. “There is no black hole in our accounts and we’re charging £18,000 a year to our international students, so it feels like a strategic decision [to cut his department] has been taken at a higher level, even if it means writing off a big block of income,” he says.

At another “squeezed middle” university, even research groups with a track record of winning large grants are not being spared, adds a professor there. This is partly because of “ridiculous” cost models that deem researchers a drain on resources by virtue of their working on campus. “If I get a grant, this will allow me to employ a postdoc, but my institution claims it will cost it £80,000 a year in heating, lighting and other central costs for that person to occupy an office, as opposed to leaving it empty,” the professor says. “Who can really break even on research in this situation? No funder is going to cover these sorts of costs.”

Such shortfalls might have once been met by the £2 billion in quality-related (QR) funding paid to English universities alone every year, dependent on their showing in the REF. Yet doubts about whether this funding stream still has much influence over departments’ fates are underlined by a departmental head who tells THE: “REF money only makes a difference if you’re [in the] top five. Otherwise, it’s only helpful to indicate you’re doing a good job.”

Another issue with QR funding is that while it is calculated on the basis of departmental performance, “it is very scattered – it’s paid to the whole university, so you can’t really rely on it,” says a research leader in social sciences, whose department is also facing cuts. Still, QR was previously “useful” to the department “because, as our university’s top REF unit, we’d tell the rest of our school, which did a lot of teaching, ‘You keep the teaching score up and we’ll look after the research – we’ll get the department noticed’,” he says. However, that “amazing relationship” is now “broken because we’ve been told that research quality doesn’t matter and it basically comes down to how expensive you are”.

Some see in this apparent indifference to research quality a move away from former polytechnics’ post-1992 aspirations to compete with and be judged against existing universities on the latter’s traditional turf – a change accelerated by the emergence of other indicators of esteem in which non-traditional universities can excel, such as the Teaching Excellence Framework and, indeed, the REF’s adoption of impact as one of its metrics (currently worth 25 per cent of total scores) in 2014.

“In the decade or so after polys became universities, it seemed there was money to support excellence,” observes one humanities professor. “This time feels different – it seems that post-92s aren’t trying to win on [research] quality any longer and are putting everything they’ve got into impact, where they’re able to chart a lot higher.”

Those shifting institutional priorities may help to explain why some universities – and not only former polytechnics – have been willing to impose substantial cuts on what could be regarded as their best research units. In May, for instance, the Royal Historical Society publicly protested against plans by the University of Lincoln to cut one in four staff members in its history department, which finished in joint 18th place by GPA in the 2021 REF, ahead of universities such as Bristol, Cambridge and Edinburgh. The cuts are part of a reported 220 planned redundancies, over which Lincoln staff have voted to strike.

Surrey’s world-leading linguistics research unit – the Surrey Morphology Group – has also been earmarked for cuts, while Kingston University’s acclaimed Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy has been put under review a little over a decade after it moved to Kingston from Middlesex after the latter closed its philosophy department. Even prestige research institutes – such as the national nuclear facilities hosted by Huddersfield – are not safe, with the West Yorkshire institution seeking to cut 200 jobs, 12 per cent of its workforce.

Where might this road lead? Clearly, there are many possibilities depending on how policy, funding and economic conditions develop under the new Labour government. But one of the possible scenarios recently mapped out for the Higher Education Policy Institute by former Sheffield Hallam vice-chancellor Sir Chris Husbands is very relevant here.

“There is no realistic way through the issues facing English universities without thinking about the future shape and size of the sector,” Husbands said in early June. And whoever won the general election would “need to think hard about the higher education the [UK] needs and is willing to support”.

One of the broad scenarios he envisages would see the government accept that financial constraints meant it “could not afford all the research it, or the sector, wanted”, leading it to impose a “sharp differentiation” between a small number of institutions in which research was fully funded and a much larger number of universities focused on teaching, employability and research translation.

Elaborating on this “history” of a possible future, Husbands writes: “In looking for an objective measure to determine the reshaping, [the government] deployed REF outcomes…If institutional REF income would be less than a set figure (either per member of staff or as an institutional minimum), then the institution secured no QR funding.” That left two possible funding sources for non-research universities: Innovate UK for translational research and a specific fund for smaller specialist institutions.

As Husbands imagines it, the research institutions collaborated closely with the translational and specialist institutions “to drive regional and local growth, while teaching institutions – many of which had merged with larger [further education] colleges – focused on high-quality professional and academic programmes. These programmes were increasingly delivered flexibly: while the three-year undergraduate degree remained the norm in the small number of research institutions, it was less common across the sector as a whole.”

Back in the present, some see a certain amount of sense in the government’s taking a more proactive approach to the research base. For instance, at a recent symposium organised by the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences, former Conservative universities and science minister David (now Lord) Willetts reflected that the size and composition of the UK’s research base is largely decided by the “subject choices of the UK’s 15-year-olds”. By opting to study humanities disciplines at A level and then at degree level, they indirectly force the government to spend billions on research-engaged academics in areas it would probably not otherwise deem top priorities, Willetts observed.

During his time in office, from 2010 to 2014, Willetts embraced the concept of industrial strategy and set out “eight great technologies” that he thought UK research should prioritise via a research budget that he helped to maintain at the height of austerity by slashing the teaching budget and tripling undergraduate fees to make up the difference. However, he never proposed imposing a formal stratification of higher education.

Labour’s recent general election manifesto, meanwhile, acknowledged the scale of the university funding problem but was silent on what the party would do about it. However, a party steeped in egalitarianism seems highly unlikely to adopt a solution that involves confining research to “elite” universities.

Still, many universities have taken the view by themselves that greater differentiation is important for their future success.

“They have to find identities, expressions of purpose, which are not simply about being second-best Russell Group institutions, nor upmarket post-92s,” says Ian Pace, professor of music, culture and society at City, University of London, where he is an adviser on interdisciplinarity. “We have to recognise that different universities serve different purposes in this time. We should not feel overly beholden to the essentially Humboldtian model [of researcher-teachers] provided by the Russell Group.”

City’s tagline – “the university for business, practice and the professions” – is an example, says Pace, of how some institutions are “moving in the direction of more regular and extensive engagement with these things” rather than simply chasing research excellence, which is too often defined by getting work in the “right journals”.

“It is important not to devalue [professional] practice, which has been central in some disciplines, especially those relating to medicine and health and many arts,” insists Pace.

Some post-92s are being increasingly strategic about the disciplines in which they conduct research. The University of South Wales, for instance, focuses its research in four areas – “Crime, Security, and Justice”; “Health and Well-being”; “Creative Innovation”; and “Sustainable Environment”: all areas with local relevance. Nottingham Trent University, one of the highest-ranked modern universities in the 2021 REF, at joint 55th by GPA, has also refocused its research around local challenges.

“There are lots of short-term, very focused projects – sometimes citizen science – but we’ve also been starting three-year projects led by PhDs,” explains Richard Emes, the university’s pro vice-chancellor for research on its Co(l)laboratory project, which, with the University of Nottingham, will sponsor 50 PhD students on community-based projects over an eight-year period.

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For instance, one PhD project focused on Nottingham’s skateboarding community is considering everything from the higher injury rates among female skaters to how urban planning promotes outdoor activity among young people. “That’s a project that could help make cities more open, more attractive and safer for everyone,” Emes says.

It is, however, important that this kind of innovative, community-engaged research is properly recognised by universities as its results might not appear in a prestigious international journal, continues Emes.

“If you write a policy paper that is picked up by national or local governments, it could be really significant, so we now have different ways to reward that,” he says of Nottingham Trent’s “teaching and practice” career pathway, introduced in 2016 to “allow people to thrive through activities that aren’t traditional research outputs, such as knowledge exchange or consultancy”. Emes also calls on the REF to recognise locally engaged research; currently, “below nationally recognised” research is unclassified in terms of quality, while impact with limited “reach and significance” is also marked down.

The importance of locally focused research is stressed by Lincoln vice-chancellor Neal Juster. He notes that certain UK regions have long suffered from being “cold spots” for both higher education and research. And, notwithstanding Lincoln’s proposed job cuts, his view is that, “If R&D is exclusively concentrated in a handful of research-intensive universities in big cities, you are basically preventing whole swathes of the country from participating in the knowledge economy.”

For instance, Lincoln’s PhD students and researchers will often set their minds to challenges affecting Lincolnshire’s economy – from the competitiveness of its agricultural sector to the vitality of its tourist trail, centred on Lincoln’s medieval cathedral and International Bomber Command Centre, which has been visited more than 500,000 times since opening in 2018, says Juster. “It’s really important for us to have research that is fundamental to the county in which we live,” he says.

Lincoln’s annual research income is “relatively small” compared with the big research-intensives, but a “laser-like focus” on supporting areas of comparative strength means that Lincoln can punch above its weight in many areas, Juster believes. “There is no other agritech research group that is as good as ours,” he insists, adding that these clusters of excellence help to create “haloes” that drive industry investment. (Lincoln was 19th by GPA in the agriculture, food and veterinary sciences unit in the 2021 REF.)

Without a research-engaged university such as Lincoln – which moved its main campus from Hull in 2002 – the high-tech firms providing highly skilled and well-paid jobs will go elsewhere, Juster says. “If you’re not doing research, you’re a further education college – not a university. Our colleges do a great job, but this county has a big skills deficit and that means it needs not just apprentices but graduates, postgraduates and PhD graduates, too,” he says.

Leaving research to the Russell Group would be a huge mistake, agrees Glasgow’s Back, as it would hugely diminish the richness of UK research. “If you look at London’s most famous global institutions, they have some incredibly bright people, but they are fairly placeless – they’re globally orientated and don’t engage with their communities in same way as somewhere like Goldsmiths does,” he argues.

Still, the pressure to cut back on loss-making activities such as research is only going to get stronger unless the new government gets to grips with university funding. Nottingham Trent’s Emes has “worked in academic groups at Oxford, UCL and Nottingham, so I’ve seen both sides of the sector – we are all in a really difficult place, and it will be hard to manage our way through”.

And Back fears that university management’s reaction to the funding pressures could push the UK towards a Husbands-style scenario without the need for government fiat.

“I fear we’re moving to a hierarchical system where only scholars at elite institutions will research,” he says. “It is creating a whole reserve army of brilliant minds who will never realise their full potential. It is such a mistake because it will take years to rebuild what’s being lost.”

The post-92 premium

As a high-profile expert in early childhood development, cognitive neuroscientist Sam Wass could take his £2 million in research grants to any number of grateful university employers.

So it might surprise some that Wass – best known as a talking head on the award-winning Channel 4 series The Secret Life of 4-, 5- and 6-Year-Olds – chose to set up shop at the University of East London (UEL) after leaving the University of Cambridge in 2013.

One reason for his relocation was the access he would have to a more socially diverse group of children: his BabyDevLab tracks how stress in early life affects brain development, and Newham, where UEL is based, is the third most socially deprived of London’s 32 boroughs.

Another reason was the support he gets from UEL. In Cambridge, “with so many researchers, administrators are very overloaded”, he says. “It might take three or four weeks to get a response [to a query]. You’re also asked to submit grant applications at least three weeks in advance of the deadline due to this pressure.”

In contrast, he often has one-to-one meetings with UEL’s research team, who provide invaluable last-minute support on grant applications. “Having someone working on my grant on the day of submission is very useful,” reflects Wass, who holds a five-year research fellowship from the European Research Council and has previously won major grants from the Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy.

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Securing large, prestigious grants also has a greater institutional impact at UEL, which gained university status in 1992, than it would at Cambridge, Wass continues. “It feels like you’re making a difference at your institution. UEL is very motivated to support my research, which aligns with its ethos of helping young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds,” he says.

Wass involves students in his centre’s research, and since many of them are from Newham, they have been able to offer valuable insights into issues faced by local children and parents. “I grew up in east London, as did many of my team. It does make a difference when the questions are set by members of the community – you don’t really get that with big, higher-profile universities, where students come from all over the UK and the world,” says Wass, who notes that local authorities and housing associations are also highly engaged with UEL, sometimes providing funding for projects.

Of course, the financial firepower of older and richer universities such as Cambridge provides certain advantages. “The standard teaching load is often lower, so everyone has the chance to do research,” says Wass. “At less research-intensive universities, if you don’t have a teaching buyout, then it can be trickier to strike a balance between the demands of teaching and developing research bids.”

On the flip side, the amount of teaching time that a successful grant bid buys you out of can be higher at modern universities, Wass adds. And while funding pressures inevitably persist, Wass has little doubt that his move away from Cambridge was the right one.

“Few other people have made this kind of move,” he concedes, “but it’s been crucial for making me feel connected to my research and for giving me the freedom and access to harder-to-reach communities that I need.”